Day Two at php|works started off with a bang. Rasums presented his “Getting Rich with PHP” as the opening keynote. If you’ve never seen this presentation, the OSCON version is described here with links to a video of it as well as the slides. It’s an interesting presentation. I missed the first section of it at OSCON where he slaps around both IE and FLASH pointing out some serious security holes. Again, it’s a great presentation and worth the time to listen to.

I was only able to attend one session on Day Two due to my other duties. I chose Sebastian Bergmann’s Testing Applications with PHPUnit. Sebastian did a great job of showing all the cool new whiz-bang in PHPUnit3.

From there I started my interviews. I was privileged to talk with Chris Hartjes about the work he is doing. We had a great time and talked a lot about topics like scaling vBulletin.

I talked with Ilia Alshanetsky about his role as the maintainer of the PHP 5.2 tree. It was interesting to get an inside look at what goes on just to get a new version of PHP out the door. We also talked about PHP Security since he wrote one of books on it.

Speaking of security, I also got to sit down with Chris Shiflett. As you would expect, we talked about PHP security. We also talked about life at Omni. Among other things, Chris said that Omni is looking for a Junior Security Analist. Since OmniTI is one of the premier PHP shops in the US, this is an excellent opportunity for the right person.

Finally, I was able to sit down with Sebastian Bergmann. Sebastian and I talked about PHPUnit3. We talked about integrating it with your development environment. PHPUnit3 will integrate tightly with Subversion as well as CruiseControl giving you the tools to do continuous integration.

After dinner, many of us headed back into the main ballroom for a little fun and games. Arbi setup 3 XBox game systems, provided by Paul Reinheimer. He hooked each of them up to a separate screen and projector the presenters had used during the day. The resulting setup allows 6 racers to race simultaneously. Those who wanted to were allowed to compete for the grand prize of a brand new XBox 360. Out of all the racers who competed, the best six times were called back up to go head to head. The 3 winners of those races then each got their own screen and XBox to race on, all connected via the wireless network.

When it was all said and done, Chris Zoelick smoked us all on 3 different tracks and two different cars. He took home a brand new XBox 360 for his troubles.

All in all, Day Two was a fun and informative day. Lots of fun, fellowship and some good food to boot.

Until tomorrow.

=C=