Jay and I flew out to Spokane, Washington and then took an hour drive south to Pullman for a quick day trip to visit Pullman Regional Hospital for an upcoming project. We left on a small jet and arrived on a small propeller craft. We got out of town just as a snow storm came rolling through.

The holiday season was much busier than I was expecting and it looks like the new year is off to a busy start. I’ve posted a few pictures of the trip below.

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