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Thu, 28 Feb 2008 6:19 UTC
Elizabeth Naramore announced PHP Appalachia 2008 earlier this week.
WHAT IS PHP APPALACHIA? A PHP unconference nestled in the Smoky Mountains, for those who like to camp or stay in a cabin, enjoy spending time with friends, and talking about PHP. As before, we will have a few presentations, but a lot of the time will be flexible and spent how the group sees fit at the time.
Details are still being finalized. Keep watching Elizabeth’s blog for more information, and I’m sure someone will update http://www.phpappalachia.org/ in the near future. 
UPDATE: Keith Casey also blogged about it. I was out of town for several days, so I missed lots. 
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Tags: camping, conferences, php, phpappalachia
Tue, 30 Oct 2007 2:10 UTC
I’m privileged to be in Redmond, WA this week at the Microsoft Web Development Summit. (Special thanks to Glen Gordon for sending me an invitation.) Also in attendance are a good crowd of PHP developers from various backgrounds and experience, including developers from Drupal, Gallery, Facebook, CakePHP, Solar, core developers, extension developers, authors, and just plain PHP programmers. Microsoft has invited us to their main campus in an effort to reach out to the PHP community to solicit opinions and feedback on various technologies, including IIS, Silverlight, their Ajax library, Expression Web, etc.
I’ll be taking time to condense my thoughts and reactions into a single blog post later this week after I’ve returned home and rested, but for now, you can follow along as I take notes on my personal “notes” wiki. I’ve made the conference notes section available for reading to the public. So, you can read my notes for the Microsoft Web Development Summit, if you like.
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Tags: conferences, microsoft, php, wd07, webdevsummit07
Fri, 28 Sep 2007 3:08 UTC
In just over a week, I’ll be flying to sunny California to attend and speak at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo. I’ll be giving two talks at the conference: “Give Your Site a Boost With Memcached” and “Mobilizing & Sharing: How the Zend Framework Builds Community for Nokia MOSH.” The former is an updated version of a talk I gave earlier this year in Germany; the latter is a new talk I’m giving with my colleague Brian DeShong, and it’s more or less a case study of Schematic’s use of the Zend Framework in building Nokia’s mobile social networking website, MOSH.
A month ago, I wrote about the unconference being held at ZendCon this year. The unconference is a community space provided by Zend and organized by Patrick Reilly to facilitate discussion among members of the PHP developer community. This space is open to all conference attendees, who are free to schedule a time slot to lead a discussion or give a presentation. This is a perfect opportunity for you if you’re interested in testing the presentation waters by giving your first talk at a conference, trying out a new (or rehashing an old) presentation, or just sharing your knowledge with and learning from others. Be sure to add your session to the schedule soon!
I’ll be giving a new talk at the unconference with the obnoxiously long title “Getting Information About Your Upload Before It’s Finished Uploading or How To Use A Very Long Presentation Title To Otherwise Say I’m Talking About pecl/uploadprogress.” (Look for a blog post about pecl/uploadprogress from me soon.)
Finally, don’t forget about the #zendcon channel on the Freenode IRC network. That’s your place to chat with other attendees during the conference and find out where everyone’s going for food and drinks in the after-hours. In addition, there is a zendcon twitter user. Start following it today to get zendcon tweets during the conference.
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Tags: conferences, php, zendcon, zendcon07
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:27 UTC
It’s been a week since Day 3 (Day 2 for those on the zero-indexed conference time-table), and it’s high time I got around to writing up my thoughts on the conference…
I arrived late to Sebastian Bergmann’s “Graph-Oriented Programming with PHP” presentation, where he showed how to use graph-oriented programming to implement workflows in PHP applications.
Next up was Maggie Nelson’s “How to Optimize a Database Query,” about which others have written nice things. (As a side note, Maggie presented this with live examples from the Oracle command line interface instead of using slides—a difficult and risky way to present, but she pulled it off flawlessly.)
After that, I sat in on Ed Finkler’s “Intro to Code Igniter” presentation. As a minimalistic framework (which I love), Code Igniter appears promising, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it makes attempts to be supported on PHP 4, so there are no advanced OOP techniques being used.
The highlight of the day came next with Terry Chay’s new talk “The Internet Is An Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture” where Terry was his typical self, dropping the f-bomb and pointing out where popular books are dead wrong. I look forward to watching him present this again at ZendCon and seeing how it’s evolved by then.
Finally Chris Jones and Ed Finkler rounded out the day with “Next Generation Database Applications” and “Securing the PHP Environment With PhpSecInfo” (respectively).
In all, this was one of the best PHP conferences I’ve attended. I agree with Ed, who said, “php|architect conferences lack pretension, and that’s really nice—it’s about the people and sharing knowledge.” This really was the case. And there wasn’t a time slot that I couldn’t find something of interest to attend; all the speakers and topics were interesting and relevant. Kudos to the folks at php|architect for having the discernment to select excellent presenters/topics!
There was one thing, however, that was a shame: although the event was held in Atlanta, there were few locals in attendance. I counted about five or six from the Atlanta PHP user group, but apart from that, I don’t know of any others from Atlanta who attended.
Atlanta PHP developers: you had a PHP conference in your backyard, and you missed it! What a wasted opportunity!
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Tags: conferences, php, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:03 UTC
Even though today is officially “day 1” of php|works, I consider it “day 2” because I spent the majority of yesterday (six hours of it) standing and talking to a room full of people about topics they need to know to pass the Zend Certification Exam. It was a tiring day, and my lack of sleep and trek through two hours of Atlanta rush-hour traffic didn’t help. Still, I made it through the day, I think the tutorial was a success, and I hope that those attending who took the exam yesterday or today passed with flying colors.
Today began with Andrei Zmievski’s keynote entitled “The Future: PHP6,” or “Im in ur endginn, playin wif ur stringz.” Here are a few notes I gleaned from his presentation:
- Unicode is so simple you could probably explain it to Paris Hilton, or Miss Teen South Carolina might be able to explain it to you.
- PHP6 = PHP5 + Unicode, PHP5 = PHP6 – Unicode, Unicode = PHP6 – PHP5
- mojibake: phenomenon of incorrect, unreadable characters shown when software fails to render a text according to its associated encoding
- “APC is the best thing to happen to PHP since Rasmus stopped working on it single-handedly.”
- “Ask yourself: Can I live with PHP 4? Until 8/8/8? If yes, you’re done. Thanks for playing.”
Afterwards, I supported my colleague, Maggie Nelson, by attending her talk, “You Don’t Need A DBA.” I had the opportunity to see a preliminary version of her talk, and while I enjoyed the preliminary version, she had vastly improved it with great examples and information.
After Maggie’s presentation, it was my turn to give my talk “Designing RESTful Web Applications.” The slides for this talk are already available on my site.
Due to some unavoidable distractions from work, I had to miss the lunchtime keynote, “PHP 4 is dead! Migrate your code,” delivered by Chris Shiflett. This was unfortunate because I was apparently featured in all my drunken karaoke glory on one of the slides. Now, I’ll never know how I helped to convince people to transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.
The highlight presentation of the day, though, was perhaps Sara Golemon’s “How PHP Ticks.” In this talk, Sara explained how the PHP engine converts PHP code into tokens, which get further converted into their opcodes that the Zend engine then runs. It was very informative and not at all dry, due mostly in part to Sara’s sense of humor and presentation style. Two big take-aways from this talk:
- Use token_get_all() to get all the tokens in your script
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:24 UTC
Here are the slides from my Designing RESTful Web Applications presentation I gave today at php|works.
REST (or Representational State Transfer) has become a buzzword to describe almost any application that uses XML over HTTP as a Web Service, but REST is more than XML over HTTP, and it’s more than another Web Service mechanism like SOAP and XML-RPC; REST is an architectural pattern that can be applied to Web applications.
While REST is generally applied to Web Services, the principles that embody REST can be applied to all Web applications, providing better information design, cleaner URLs, and a more “semantic web” approach.
This talk will explain the principles and theory behind REST–starting with its basic foundation, HTTP—offer a detailed approach to design a RESTful application, and examine several so-called RESTful Web Services and explain why they may or may not follow REST principles.
Enjoy the slides:
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Tags: conferences, phpworks, phpworks2007, rest, talks, works07
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:06 UTC
So, I’m here gearing up for php|works at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near the Atlanta airport. I’m giving a 6-hour Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course tomorrow. Following that, I’ll play host to some speakers and conference attendees (as a sort of unofficial social coordinator—as if I have those skills) for after-hours dinner and drinks. If you’re interested in hanging out after-hours this week, look me up at the conference and let me know.
Also, I’ll be logged into #phpc on Freenode IRC this week along with many other conference attendees. The channel will serve as a sort of (unofficial) conference chatter channel to find conference goers, make plans, and make general mischief, heckling the speakers behind their backs. 
I assume there’s still time to register if you’re interested in attending.
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Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07, zce
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:24 UTC
Atlanta PHP is proud to welcome php|works to Atlanta, GA on September 12-14!
php|architect invites you to Harness the Power of PHP, at this year’s php|works conference.
This year’s edition of php|works will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the Braves and of the Atlanta PHP user group, on September 13th and 14th, with an extra tutorial day on September 12th.
The conference once again promises to be an excellent event for PHP developers of all levels, with talks from top PHP experts such as Derick Rethans, Chris Shiflett, Andrei Zmievski, Sara Golemon, and many more (and plenty of new faces, as well).
Sign up today before the conference sells out!
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Tags: atlanta, atlphp, conferences, php, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 0:14 UTC
I just wanted to take a moment to promote the PHP Unconference to be hosted this year by Zend during the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo in Burlingame, CA. The Chairperson for the PHP Unconference ‘07 is none other than the PHP community’s very own Patrick Reilly. He’ll be in charge of making sure things run smoothly and that the open community aspect of the unconference is maintained.
Patrick writes this on the Zend Conference wiki page for the PHP Unconference:
When was the last time an event challenged your assumptions, and made you think?
The PHP Unconference is a way to bring people who have a shared interest in PHP together. It could be just to explore interest in a common theme or it could be to do work together to accomplish a goal.
The PHP Unconference is being hosted by Zend Technologies Ltd. as a community space that it is sponsoring and helping create.
In addition to running the unconference, Patrick has created a #zendcon IRC channel for all attendees of the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. This channel will serve as an excellent community gathering place during the conference to chat about presentations, ideas, and where to get drinks. It’s located on the Freenode network, so stop by and say “hi.”
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Tags: conferences, php, zendcon, zendcon07, ZendConference, zendconference2007
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 3:02 UTC
Last year, a substantial number of regulars of #phpc attended the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, so we decided to make #phpc t-shirts for everyone. This year, that number of attendees from #phpc has dramatically risen, and, again, we’ll be creating special t-shirts, this time using the original PHPCommunity.org logo created by Peter Jovanovic (with contributions from Richard Davey).
If you’ll be attending the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, and you’d like to show your support for PHPCommunity.org, then use this handy form to buy a shirt. Ligaya Turmelle will be in charge of handing out the shirts at the conference. If you can’t make it to the conference, and you’d still like a shirt, I’m sure Lig can work out something for you (like shipping). Just ask her on the IRC channel.
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Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, zendcon, ZendConference
