Lunch with Patrick and Camden

Today, I had lunch with Patrick Reilly and Camden Spiller. Both were in town for the LISA conference at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, so I met them there and we walked a few blocks to Max Lager’s for lunch.

Patrick is a frequenter of the #phpc channel on Freenode IRC, so I’ve spoken with him quite a bit, and this was an excellent opportunity to place a name with a face. I also considered it another great PHP community-building experience; I’m beginning to feel that PHP developers in Atlanta are few and far between, so it’s always good to meet others.

For example, just the other day, I was at the Dot Org conference. I spoke to Tirza of ifPeople, and she said that she’s finding it hard to get good PHP developers because all her developers want to “program in object-oriented languages.” Is this myth still proliferating? I explained that PHP 5 has a completely redesigned object model so that now it can be called a true “object-oriented” language. She just smiled a seemingly humoring smile. Perhaps she was just humoring me, but one thing is for certain: she seemed excited to hear about the Zend Certification, something she did not know about.

So, my lunch with Patrick and Camden went well. Both are PHP programmers, and my impression is that Patrick probably has a wealth of knowledge and experience on the subject – perhaps even beyond my expertise. I don’t know what impression I left on them, but I suspect that I wasn’t exactly what they expected. While I love to program and consider myself a fairly good programmer, I feel that I’m a far better writer than a programmer, and I think that I’m much better on paper than in person. ;-)

The only thing I think all of us wish had been better about our lunch would’ve been the presence of George Schlossnagle, who was in town this week for INBOX and left a few hours before our lunch. Patrick tried to bribe him with a free lunch, but it seems he had to leave.

I look forward to catching up with these guys at future PHP conferences.