Well, this year’s php|works has come and gone. Slides are being archived on the web and everybody is shaking hands good bye. Let’s glance back at the final days of the conference before we put this one to bed.

In Thursday’s opening keynote address Joe Stagner of Microsoft talked about his work at Microsoft as the PHP Evangelist. He talked about the different projects Microsoft has going involving open source. Joe, who’s business card lists his title as Microsoft’s “Opinionated Misfit Geek” is an excellent presenter. While he and I differ on some minor points, I’m glad PHP had a friend like him inside Microsoft.

In first session on Thursday, I went up against Chris Hartjes and Ilia Alshanetsky for mindshare. I presented my talk, “Debugging PHP without cursing…mostly.” I know I had a great time. If you were in my session, you guys were great and I hope you had as much fun as I did.

I went to Wez Furlong’s PDO: An Introduction for the second session. it was a very interesting talk for me since I do a lot of database work. It was basically the same talk he gave at OSCON but since I missed it there it was new to me. Wez points out early on that PDO is a data access abstraction not a data base abstraction. The difference being that PDO tries to unify the methods you use to access your database, not to help unify the disparate DML.

After lunch everybody went to Derick Rethans’ Derick’s Ranting Hour. There wasn’t much ranting but there were a lot of good questions posed by the audience that Derick (with occasional help from Rasums, who was sitting in the audience) answered.

I wasn’t able to attend the afternoon sessions due to other obligations however, I talked with people who attended them and they said everyone did a great job. The official day ended with Marco moderating a panel on the new Zend Certification for PHP 5. Dhwani Vahia, Chris Shifflet, Ilia Alshanetsky, Christian Wentz were the members of the panel and they discussed questions that had been presented earlier.

The evening’s entertainment was Sean Coates’ “Trivia Contest” hosted by Paul Reinheimer and assisted by Dhwani Vahia. A rousing “Jeopardy like” contest to win a MacBook. After over an hour of trivia it came down to the “Final Round”. The question was “In what year was php|architect first published?” The correct answer? 2002. After the contest was over, Joey Devilla of Tucows.com entertained the crowd with accordion renditions of pop songs. He did a quick medley of:

• Metalica: One
• Britney Spears: Hit Me Baby One More Time
• Blood Hound Gang: The Bad Touch

As weird as that sounds just reading the titles of the songs, it was much more weird in person. Joey had the entire crowd in stitches before he finished. He even did a short ditty titled P-H-P to the tune of “Day By Day” that I didn’t get a chance to write the lyrics for.

The final day’s sessions were good but you could tell that attendees were starting to drag. It’s been a rough week and while everybody is interested in what the speakers have to say, it’s obvious that some people are ready to get back home and put their new knowledge into practice. I only had time to sit in one session on the last day so I chose John Coggeshall’s “Apps Made Easy on Zend Framework”. John, another fellow Zend employee, showed off the Zend Framework as well as his new ZFApp for quickly building applications using the Zend Framework. John showed off ZFApp by building a working blog in 30 minutes. It’s an impressive piece of code even if it is still early alpha. Keep an eye on John’s blog for more details and release info.

And so it ends. The sets have been struck, the wireless disconnected and as I sit here in the lobby I see old friends saying goodbye again and new friends exchange cards. Conferences are great for the information they provide you. The real takeaway though is the friends you make. I saw that when I was in Orlando at the FielMaker conference and it’s true again here. Information has a shelf-life, friendships don’t.

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