It’s been about two weeks since I returned from San Fran, as I attended the full ZendCon 2007. Most of the tutorials/sessions were enjoyable and most of them gave me some ideas for new methods as well as pointing new tools out to me. A few have already come in handy, like cvs2svn.

However, several of the presentations had very poor descriptions and were not exactly what I was expecting. A few sessions were essentially waste of time because the presenters simply read their slides and failed to show any useful examples. Those sessions were simply a very expensive blog post, and I’ll be discouraging any and all conferences I go to from allowing that.

I met several folks from various projects and I was able to give feedback about some of their items. I had lunch with a few guys from Zend, who were involved in developing the Zend Studio IDE.

I also got to play around with the next version of the Studio app, which in my opinion is not quite ready (although it was a Beta). This new version is based off of the Eclipse project.

However, the new Adobe FlexBuilder2 is also built on eclipse, so it may eventually be easier for me to move to more eclipse-based projects.

Now it’s time for me to re-read some of slides from those presentations and see if I can re-brew for any new information.

I’ll be attending the Zend PHP Conference this year. As usual I’ve planned out my schedule. I’m very excited for this as it’s geared toward what I do much more than Webvisions or OSCON of 2006.

October 07 2007
Depart: Portland, OR at 10:16 AM
Arrive: San Francisco, CA at 12:00 PM

October 12 2007
Depart: San Francisco, CA at 6:19 PM
Arrive: Portland, OR at 7:59 PM

We’ll be staying at the hotel which happens to be hosting the conference: Hyatt

My Conference Schedule

Monday, October 8

• 9:00 - 12:00: PHP Development Best Practices (1)
• 1:30 - 4:30: PHP Development Best Practices (2)

Tuesday, October 9

• 8:30 - 9:45: Zend Opening Keynote: Unlocking the Value
• 10:00 - 11:00: Enterprise PHP: Cross Section of a real Implementation
• 11:15 - 12:15: PayPal: New Solutions for PHP Developers
• 1:30 - 2:30: Keynote: Intelligence Emerging from the Internet Space
• 2:45 - 3:45: State of PHP Security
• 4:00 - 5:00: High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques
• 5:15 - 6:15: Working With Web Services
• 6:00 + : Exhibit Hall

Wednesday, October 10

• 8:30 - 9:30: Designing PHP Based RIAs for Richer Internet Experiences
• 9:45 - 10:45: PHP Features You Didn’t Know Existed
• 11:00 - 12:00: ?
• 1:30 - 2:30: Great Software
• 2:45 - 3:45: ?
• 4:00 - 5:00: Security 2.0
• 5:15 - 6:15: PHP & Agile Development Methodologies
• 6:00 + : Exhibit Hall
• 7:00- 8:00: Birds of a Feather Sessions (? possibly)

Thursday, October 11

• 8:30 - 9:30: Stay Free! How Open Source Affects Culture
• 9:45 - 10:45: PHP Migration Concepts
• 11:00 - 12:00: Monitoring & Managing PHP Applications
• 12:15 - 1:00: Closing Keynote

Microsoft held another launch event and since I enjoyed attending the last one I decided to go. The first event I wanted to attend was full so I had to settle for another one. It was a fairly sad introduction to Vista and Office 2007. They kept focusing on unimportant eye-candy, but they didn’t really talk about any of the features that will improve your actual productivity.

They kept using keywords and slogans and they just said ‘these new releases will increase security and productivity while keeping things easy to use” but they never actually went into detail. The most we really saw of Vista is what we saw in between presentations as the demo machine was running it. However, I’m not sure what laptop they had but Vista was running perfectly.

Because of what I do I’ll eventually need to get Vista, but I am eager to play around with it as well. I received a free standard edition of Office 2007 for attending (otherwise I would never have gone), so I’ll be playing with that. I don’t use any of the Office applications much anymore except Excel. I use Word for project contracts, but that’s about it - the rest of my documents are created in Google Documents.

I played with the Office 2007 beta last year and was fairly impressed, so I’m excited to have a copy that is more stable and is actually a final product. Now, if they would have just given me a copy of Vista I’d be set!

Friday! The keynotes on the last day of OSCON were the best: A very cool presentation by Dave Bradely (IBM engineer who invented ctrl+alt+delete) about the history of computers and what open source means to him.

Then, Damian Conway (Perl master) gave an amazing fake-keynote on some great new technologies. It was really just a skit to make fun of tech trends today but it was so funny that people were about to fall out of their seats. I’ve heard that Damian is an amazing speaker even when he’s serious. Makes me really regret his Mastering VIM tutorial.

I attended one really boring session of the titled-wrong-just-so-you-might-attend kind, kind of a bait-and-switch situation. I then decided to attend a full session from Dave Bradley about the history of PCs because I was so interested from his morning keynote. Not quite a usual OSCON session but it was a good way to end the sessions.

The closing keynote was by a lawyer who is involved in protecting free software and trying to protect us from the patent system. He went on for a while longer than necessary but he really had people thinking by the end. He was the only speaker I saw recieve a standing ovation.

I then headed back to work to finish up some loose ends. I had spent almost forty hours over the last two weeks carrying around my laptop bag and sitting for hours on end - not only is my mind ready for a break but so is my shoulders and back.

Beth took the MAX down to meet me after work and we had a picnic at the waterfront. Later I took her to Pioneer Courthouse Square for the Flicks on the Bricks showing of City Slickers. It was colder than we anticipated but we really had fun.

One of my coworkers mentioned that I was probably the first web engineer to work for TechTracker who had attended all three days of the sessions - and all of the sessions available on each day. Most just picked a few and then left to return to work. She was surprised that I had actually spent so much time there.

I asked her to also mention the fact that I got my work done while doing so - that is a crucial thing to remember. However, I told her that I was surprised. The other web engineer did attend some sessions but she didn’t stay for more than a few.

My reasoning was that I’m being giving the chance to learn anything I want relating to the open source technology from the best open source leaders in the world - for free. The only thing that kept me from attending more session was the laws of physics. Having the chance to be exposed to the crowd and the information is worth having to work until two in the morning. It’s only a few days.

Oh well, that’s them. This is me.

The morning keynotes were a bit boring for me so I went out to the hall and started checking email and such. There was a lady who was doing some interviews to gather research for a paper on the open source movement and about technology groups in general and she spoke with me for abour twenty minutes, it was very interesting.

I ran down to the Exhibit Hall to see if there was anyone new but there wasn’t, and no one had brought in any new swag or anything so I went and sat in one of the blow-up chairs until the first session. The first session was done by Rasmus Lerdorf, the creater of PHP. It was very cool to see him speak and to think that he created the programming language that I use every day. Plus, he was a good speaker with a good topic.

The next session was about PostgreSQL, an alternative to MySQL which I figured I’d check out. I’ve been wanting to plat with it for a while but I’m so comfortable with MySQL that I don’t see any reason to switch over. I even asked the guys at the PostgreSQL both why I should switch, and they seemed a bit unprepared for that question.

The afternoon continued with presentations on PHP from Chris Shiflett again, Laura Thomson, and John Coggeshall - all three are major players in the PHP world. All three were very interesting sessions.

I next attended a meeting of the local PHP group, PDXPHP (which I’ve attended before), because they had almost every PHP big-wig at OSCON drop by from some Q&A. Rasmus, Chris, Laura, John, Andre, Wez, etc. It was very exciting.

I got home a bit earlier than expected but I immediately started working on some TechTracker work. There was some urgency in the work so for the first time in three years I was up until 2 the next morning.

The second day of OSCON was definately better in terms of the session content.