Well somehow it got to be that time of year again... at present, we're less than two weeks from ZendCon 2009.  Odds are, if you're going, you've already booked your flight, bought your tickets, maybe even reviewed the schedule a couple times and marked your have to see sessions.

But odds are that you missed something:  Your session.

I know, I know.  Your session wasn't accepted this year - the competition was fierce - but you have one more shot in the ZendCon Uncon.

Alright, quite a few people still don't know what an Unconference is...  An Unconference is an event where attendees pitch ideas they want to present, everyone votes on ideas they want to see, and we schedule the whole thing at the last minute.  Yes, it's a little chaotic but it ends up being a great place to explore new ideas, new presentations, and even give new speakers a chance to stand out.  The exciting thing is that the format is open.  You can give a standard presentation, participate or lead a round table or panel discussion, or even do a hands-on workshop.  Last year we had a round table on "Women in IT", a presentation on the internals of Adobe AIR, and a panel discussion on updating your technology infrastructure on a shoestring and a prayer.

This year we already have ideas ranging from Doctrine 2.0 to PHP on Windows to PHP User Groups to Unit Testing with the Zend Framework to... well, you still need to submit yours, don't you?

All you need to do is visit: http://joind.in/event/zendcon09-uncon and submit your idea or vote on ideas of interest.

And even if you can't afford ZendCon this year, not a problem.  My friend and unindicted co-conspirator Eli White (Community Manager at Zend) managed to negotiate an ZendCon Uncon pass for only $99 using discount code: UNSP9.

Unfortunately, you only have two days left... after October 9th, your only option is to buy a pass on site.

I went to Hamburg last weekend to visit the PHP Unconference, which was probably my first conference ever. I've been to a couple barcamps and other smaller events, but anyway, this felt more like a real conference to me. That is, if I exclude ALA and the various ad:tech's I had to go to.

The reasons why I usually avoid tech conferences include foremost the price tag (working for myself, I can technically label it as an expense, but I still have to pay for it), doubts that it'll be worth it in terms of knowledge gained and probably time. I tend to catch up with people outside of conferences (when they are in Berlin :-)) and that has worked well for me.

I'm glad I set all these things aside for Hamburg (and it was all too easy). A lot of people expressed how much they liked their (often 3rd) PHP Unconference, and I can second, or third that — job really well done. Ulf Wendel took it one step further, blogged and asked, "Is perfect too boring?", because everything worked out so well. I guess I would say, "No, it's not boring", and I'm inclined to add, "Thanks, it really felt like having a weekend off, yet I still learned something and met a ton of nice people (or connected online nicknames to real faces)!".

I can definitely see why people visit the PHP Unconference each year, and I'll be one of them next year! ;-)

As I said, I had a great time, both my topics were accepted too. One was merged with another PHP performance talk which was overbooked with PHP VIPs which is why I decided to listen to Kore Nordmann's talk on CouchDB instead, and the other one ("Deployment") — I kind of overslept. And I'm sorry about that! I'll make sure to avoid party, party Hamburg next year.

Here are the slides for my Zend Framework (performance) talk, I hope you find them interesting:

The slides and speaker-notes contain...

• a small intro as of why I think it's worth while to get into the ring with it
• hints and pointers on general PHP optimization
• I detail on a couple components (e.g. things to look out for and how to overcome them)

Make sure to check the speaker notes (using this link) — I didn't put everything in there, but a lot.

(The deployment slides will be up later this weekend.)

This also reminds me to improve my presentation-fu. I need something as kickass as keynote, but for Windows (currently). If anyone has a pointer, let me know. ;-)

Es ist immer wieder erstaunlich, was Freilwillige und Enthusiasten so alles auf die Beine stellen können. Das beginnt in Nordamerika mit der PHP Quebec, die im nächsten Jahr ConFoo heißen wird, und endet mit der PHP Unconference in Hamburg - zumindest, wenn man die Landkarte von links nach rechts und von oben nach unten liest [...]

Thomas moderated a discussion during the PHP-Unconference-Hamburg on SVN commit hooks. It showed that there is interest in my commit message parser, so that I make it available now…

This weekend I attended the PHP Unconference in the lovely city of Hamburg (if you don't count the wheather in). It was a really great event with a superb organisation, from my point of view even better then the some "professional" conferences. So, first a big thank you to the hosts from the PHP Usergroup Hamburg, you did a wonderful job.

Speaking about professional conferences, it's interesting to see that I'm not the only one with a very sceptical look on the International PHP Conference. Other attendees I spoke with had similar thoughts: always the same speakers with nearly the same topics, degrading the purpose of IPC to networking only. It would be more interesting with more fresh blood and a broader range of topics. Of course this would mean more risk for the host, but I believe in the long run the current development will ruin the IPC. Or can I just not imagine that there are so much companies out there paying several hundred Euros just for networking?

From the sessions I attended the Performance pessimization talk was really fun and insightful. Starting with an optimal (hardware) architecture Kris Köhntopp, Johann Hartmann, Stefan Priebsch and Lars Jankofsky made changes to this architecture to decrease its performance one after another. Both the audience and the speakers had very much fun in adding one "improvement" after another.

For the PHP in the Enterprise session I have rather mixed feelings. While Kris Köhntopp made some really good remarks on maturity of business models and their surrounding processes I think the whole session suffered from an undefined target. "Talking about Enterprise PHP" is not sufficient as session target. It was like a "Let's have a meeting on topic X, but we don't define an agenda for it." Well, from that point it was really enterprisy.

Together with Thorsten Rinne I did a presentation on Things to consider for testable code - I feel a bit sorry for Thorsten as his main purpose was to stress the important points of my presentation rather then talking about refactoring bad code to better code, the topic originally voted for.

To my surprise the audience seemed to appreciate it. I was very unsure if it would work out in the way I intended it. Probably I should add more examples for the Dependency Injection part as it was requested to see some real-life code, however I'm not sure how much it helped to better understand how it works. In every case I will add one or another point against Dependency Injection, as it seems that there are only benefits but no drawbacks. If you attended the session and would like to give feedback about what can be improved please drop a comment.

On sunday Oliver Müller (Btw, thanks to Oliver for taking us on a tourist tour around the Reeperbahn on saturday night. ) gave an interesting overview of current state-of-the-art technologies for implementing Single Sign-on systems. It raised new questions for a project I will do in the upcoming months.

Another interesting session was from Stefan Priebsch about the Model-View-Controler (MVC) design pattern. While I felt uncomfortable with the label "MVC" on Stubbles for quite some time now the talk finally convinced me to drop this label. MVC in the web is fundamentally different from MVC in desktop gui applications, where it was originally invented for, and there seems to be no common understanding of what MVC in web applications should really look like. That's not surprising as there are different solutions possible, and it strongly depends on the type and size of the application you create. Heck, there are even frameworks out there with a "Model" class you should inherit all your models from, which is ind

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The Chair of this year’s ZendCon UnCon (Keith Casey) has published details about how the UnConference will be run this year, and how to start submitting papers!

These are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.

Take an extension cable

Conferences are notorious for having too few and too short power leads, and everyone needs to recharge laptops, especially in hands-on sessions like tutorial day. Having an extension cable will make you instant friends as you bring power to more people.

Join in the pre-conference hype

Follow the nominated twitter tag and log into the IRC channel if there is one. Find out who is staying in the same place as you or arriving at the same time, arrange to travel together or meet for a pre-conference drink to break the ice.

Attend the extra-curricular events

Don't think for a moment that when the official schedule ends, you are off-duty for the night! Find out about any social activities going on - and if there is an informal track such as an unconference, make sure you attend, or even participate. This is a great opportunity to meet more people and see more talks in a much less structured environment.

Take business cards

Or if you don't have that kind of job (or even if you do!) get some moo cards to take with you so you can pass on your blog/email address, name and twitter details to people you want to stay in touch with after the event.

Stay an extra day

The party starts when the conference ends, so hang around for 24 hours or so and join in :) Especially for the speakers (whose rooms are paid for) and those travelling internationally, there's no need to rush off straight away. Some of the best times I've had at conferences have been after the main event.

Keep in touch

Write up your experiences on your blog (do you have a blog? If not, this is a great place to start) and tag it appropriately. Comment on other people's and stay in touch with the new friends that you made at the conference.

OK, so technically this is six ways to make friends, but I won't apologise for that :) What's your top tip for conference attendees?

The PHP BBQ Tour is almost over. There is one chance left for you to come to a BBQ and to meet Giuseppe Maxia, the Datacharmer and leader of the MySQL Community team. The closing meeting will be held today in Kiel at the restaurant (not in the garden, no real BBQ, just like in Munich!) of the Forstbaumschule at 16:00 CEST. Its a little change in the location but no change in time.

Change for Kiel (today): due to rainy weather conditions we meet at the Forstbaumschule restaurant not in the garden, no BBQ but a meeting, just like in Munich. Same time (16:00 CEST), almost the same place as before the change. Seats have been reserved, ask for Wendel/PHP.

We had to move the Kiel BBQ to the restaurant due to bad weather conditions. It is just like yesterday in Hamburg. Yesterdays BBQ meeting had been moved into a restaurant itself. Unfortunately the change has been announced rather late on the Forge wiki, the PHP user group Hamburg mailing list and on Twitter. And, not only the location but also the time changed by 1.5 hours.

I have been surprised myself by the change. On the other hand, I stressed out several times that one had to check the wiki page immediately before the event to check for last-minute changes. However, some people did nevertheless find their way to the pub where the user group and the PHP Unconference (12.-13.09.2009) team always meets.

Ekke, Judith and the others from the PHP Unconference organisation team are still looking for sponsors. If by any chance you may be able to convince your boss to sponsor the event, please talk to him. There are more than 180 registrations for the unconference in Hamburg.

The PHP UG Berlin has set a new record for the BBQ tour. They tried to collect more attendees than the user group in Munich, but Berlin failed. Some 30 is a little, if not much, less than 34 attendees. As one contest had been lost, the idea of a new contest came up: number of ordered beers. Berlin has won that one easily, if you count glasses. In Munich you get 1l of beer per glass and in Berlin it is more like 0.3l …

It has also been a very close race between Berlin and Munich in terms of PHP "VIPs". Check out the photos. At least five people should look familiar to you, if you have ever been at the PHP Unconference in Hamburg (12-13.09.2009), the PHP room at the FrosCon or any other PHP conference, such as the International PHP Conference run by the Software&Support publishing house.

Credits to Till Klampaeckel, the others from the meet up and the various PHP dinosaurs that came to the event. It has been a wonderful summer evening in the hearth of Berlin.

… see you in Dortmund. Two more hours by train for me!

Dortmund today - 17:00 CEST
University, computer science building - free registration
the one and only BBQ with talks!
 
Hamburg tomorrow (Saturday) - 16:00 CEST
Altonaer Balkon - free registration
 
Kiel (Sunday) - 16:00 CEST
BBQ area at the Forstbaumschule - free registration
 
Check details at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/PHP_BBQ_Tour .

We've just successfully wrapped up another edition of php|tek. Yet again, I was reminded of the significance of bringing together PHP developers, core dev members, and those in industry and related technologies. Our conferences are always a lot of fun-- we work hard and play hard, and we hope everyone comes away with something besides a postcard that says "wish you were here!" or a t-shirt from Shoeless Joe's.

I won't bore you with the tales of "Geeks Gone Wild" or recap the speakers' presentations; for all that, you can check out the 800+ pics on Flickr and the slides on Slideshare. You can also read other people's wrap-ups if you're really interested.

For those who weren't there (or those who were, but missed out), we at MTA made a few surprise announcements:

• CodeWorks is our exciting fall conference this year. It's a traveling roadshow of PHP experts and we will be hitting 7 cities in 14 days! Check out the site to see if we'll be near a city near you, and be sure to take advantage of our early-bird pricing! Prices start at just $99, so make sure you check it out.
• Attendees at the conference also got a sneak peek at our new line of PHP t-shirts. We have 5 different designs and will be selling them on our site shortly, so keep an eye out for these. We will also be adding new designs all the time.

I also wanted to mention some of the things that happened in the "Hallway Track" as we call it; that time between times when cool things arise out of nowhere: unplanned, unscheduled, and off-the-cuff.

• an impromptu interview by Microsoft's Brian Gorbett, where he asked a few of the PHPWomen about our organization and what we'd like to achieve. The video is kind of long at almost 24 minutes, but if you're interested in PHPWomen, give it a look. Thanks Brian!
• a meeting with some of the heads of high-profile PHP projects, including Symfony, CakePHP, ZF, PEAR, and others to discuss coding standards across the board. As Stefan Koopmanschap stated,

  The second conference day started with a meeting with quite a few people from the PHP frameworks world, on introducing certain advised standards for PHP libraries and frameworks. These standards should make it easier for people to include and use libraries. We had a great 2-hour discussion on namespaces and naming, exception naming and handling, and some slightly related off-topic discussions. All in all, a great meeting, which resulted in the start of a new PHP mailinglist.

  I'm very interested to see what comes of this, and I think it's great they got the ball rolling!
• a compact little framework was written for fun by Travis Swicegood (of git fame) and Nate Abele (head CakePHP dev) in between sessions. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're face to face with someone. I'm sure there are other examples of projects that were worked on while at the conference, and if so- let me know!

Other interesting things that were going on during the conference:

• the Hackathon, which resulted in much code being written and much pizza being inhaled. Projects worked on included IRC Bot Phergie, ZF, Solar, and PEAR.
• the Testfest, which resulted in improved test coverage for core PHP, by 19 tests. Not too shabby for a few hours late in the afternoon/evening - good job, guys!
• the PHPWomen Craft Hour, which was scheduled as a part of the unconference.. and which also turned into a MakerFaire of sorts. For something that was so far off the beaten PHP path, a large group of us (men and women alike) had a great time crafting it up. A cool new

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