ZendCon09 Day 2

October 22nd, 2009 |

Day 2 of Zendcon is always the longest. There are lots of sessions and plenty of awesome information to be had. Here is my rundown of day 2.

Keynote – Standing Out In The Crowd – Kirrily Robert

Kirrily’s keynote was about the importance of diversity and transparency in open source projects. She talked a lot about the lack of women in Open Source projects (only 1.5% of OS participants are women) and some of the struggles that her and her fellow female programmers go through. The point of her session was diversity, transparency and acceptance. And while she did accomplish making her point, she also ruffled some feathers as with a few generalizations of her own. This hit a nerve with quite a few in the room and you could tell from the tweets coming out of it. That is all I am really going to say about it since this is not the place, but let’s just say it was controversial and it got people talking…maybe that was the point all along.

Mastering RESTful web services with Zend Framework – Rob Taylor

This was an uncon session that really was excellent. Rob introduced me to a new way of thinking about providing RESTful web services with Zend Framework. His approach was very interesting and I can’t wait to get back and try some of what he was doing. If you are interested in his slides, he posted them up on roboncode.com.

Using Zend Framework and Symfony Together – Fabien Potencier

Fabien is the lead developer for the Symfony framework. His talk was all about how Symfony and Zend Framework can play well together. Symfony has some really promising features that ZF doesn’t have, like object escaping and message dispatching. I had never entertained the idea of using both together, but because both frameworks are so well put together and so decoupled, integration is a snap.

Lunch and Afternoon Keynote

Lunch was wonderful yet again. The food has been top notch so far. After lunch, I helped man the Zend booth and talked to people about Zend Framework. I got to talk shop with Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Rob Allen for a bit, which was great because I’m pretty sure those two have forgotten more about Zend Framework than most people ever learn.

I also got to meet Chris Cornutt who is the Senior Editor for php|architect and the creator of joind.in. We have been using joind.in a lot at the conference, and I had some ideas in my head, so I posted a tweet asking about an API and he responded back. We met up in the exhibit hall and I talked to him a little about my ideas. Turns out that he is getting ready to rework the API a bit, so I volunteered to help him test if he wanted.

Role of a PHP User Group – Michelangelo van Dam, Anna Filina and Bradley Holt

This was another uncon session which delivered. As part of my job the last year, I have helped manage and direct the NCSU Web Developers list. It is a lot of fun and a very rewarding project, but I want to take it to the next level so I wanted to get some ideas of how real PHP Users Groups functioned. Keith Casey, from the DC PHP scene and ZendCon lore, talked a good bit as well about how the DCers organize. It was as much a round table as anything, which was great because there were lots of cities represented. While in the session, I started looking for a PHP Users Group in the triangle, and I think I found one but their website doesn’t seem very active at all. I found a mailing list so I decided to join. My plan is, if they don’t actually get anything going, I will try to get everyone back together. The value in User Groups is apparent and immense, and that is something I want to be a part of.

Architecting Your Models – Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Matthew is an excellent speaker. Over the years at ZendCon I have heard him speak many times, and he never fails to deliver an intelligent, useful, and inspiring talk. This year it was about models, the often forgot about and rarely hyped step-sister of the MVC paradigm. He talked about using ORMs and not repeating infrastructure when using APIs (same deal that Rob was talking about earlier with RESTful services). He gave a little insight into what is on the horizon with Zend_Entity as well, which is ZF’s implementation of an ORM. Great talk, and I took lots of notes.

Building Desktop RIAs with JavaScript and PHP – Ed Finkler

Ed’s talk was focused on buidling desktop RIAs with javascript and using PHP as a backend. His examples were based on Adobe AIR and it was all very intriguing. I haven’t used AIR or any technology like it (Appcelerator is in there too), so it was interesting. He had some cool code examples that were relevant and it was informative. Add it to the list of something I want to look into when I get back.

Adobe Reception

At the Adobe reception tonight, I sat and talked with a few folks about the activities of the day. Immediately the conversation went to the opening keynote (see, lots of people were talking about it…even 10 hours later). It was a short reception, but it was nice to have something that night. Nothing originally was planned, but Adobe stepped up and sponsored it so thanks!

Meet the Team

A conference favorite, it is always beneficial to hit up the “Meet the Team” session with the Zend who’s who. Some really great questions were asked by the audience, the best of which was by my friend Keith Casey about how Zend can support User Groups. Their response was OK, but I think

it is important for Zend to realize that User Groups could really benefit with them getting involved, and not only with

financial support. Presentations, software, and ZendCon trips would be much appreciated I am sure