Archive for the ‘Zend Conference 2008’ Category
September 25th, 2008 | 
Author: Well, not really, but we were mentioned on one of the most important PHP blogs around, DevZone. Here is the link:
http://devzone.zend.com/article/3892-ZendCon-08-Wrap-ups-Wrap-up
So basically, I am making a post on a blog (webapps), about being linked to from another blog (DevZone), about a post on our blog (webapps). The intertubez have entered an infinite loop!
Anyway, thanks to @CalEvans for adding that little tidbit in there about us. That’s pretty cool stuff right there.
Posted in Zend Conference 2008 | 
Tags: blog shout-out, infinite loop of intertubez, zendcon08 | 
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ZendCon 2008 is over, and we are back at work.
As far as I am concerned, this year’s conference was a success. We went to some really great talks, and some that were not as great. I think one of the area’s where Zend improved was in the Un-Con (shout out to Keith Casey, who put the Un-Con together). One of the best talks I heard came from there (Terry Chay’s curse-laden rant on Rails and frameworks).
The food was OK, nothing spectacular. Good job with the beverage selection though. The staff moved like clockwork, so if you were a little late getting to a meal, they were shut down and gone. And don’t dare try to order a drink after the posted “closing” time…
Overall, we learned a lot, met some cool people, learned a lot more, and even got to give a presentation. I think the next step for us is to somehow become more involved in the PHP community as a whole. There are a lot of limits on us as to what projects we can contribute to, but personally I will probably signup to be a ZF contributor (not through work, just on my own). There are a lot of ways to help, we just need to find our niche.
Anyway, conference rocked. See you next year ZendCon!
Last day of ZendCon 2008. Great conference so far, with more good talks ahead.
Scaling Mozilla’s Websites with PHP – Laura Thomson
Laura’s talk was focused on how Mozilla scales their sites using PHP and a whole lot of caching. Mozilla uses a lot of different technologies…PHP, Python, Drupal, and…surprising to me anyway….Tikiwiki. A lot of the talk was focused on implementing Tikiwiki for their Firefox 3 support tool. I have used Tikiwiki before and my experience with it was that it wasn’t all that great. It was a surprise that Mozilla picked that to use, but I suppose it is working for them. She also talked about the Firefox 3 Download Day and what went wrong and where. They got a 300x spike at 10am when FF3 went live. I guess that is enough to kill any service.
What’s New in PHP 5.3 – Lots of people
This was a “panel” style talk with people who actually write the PHP engine. There are lots of websites that have all the new features of PHP 5.3, so I am not going to write out all the changes. One of the things to note is the internationalization that was previously planned to be added to PHP6 is now going to be in PHP5.3 (unicode support). Not that that affects us much, but it shows the type of community around PHP. They saw that their users were going to need this sooner than later and then made it happen, so that is cool.
The best part about these conferences are the people. I mean, yeah, the knowledge is great, but the networking is amazing. For those of you not really “in the know”, ZendCon brings together some of the top minds in, not only PHP, but the business of the web.
I really appreciate Zend’s availability at this conference. I have gotten to rub shoulders with their CEO, the guys who started Zend, lots of their VP’s…..all kinds of people from the “suits” to the guys in the trenches making the software that I use every day. Maybe this is common at conferences (couldn’t tell you….I’ve only been to this one and a few regional ones), but either way, it is really nice.
And it’s not just Zend. Lots of people are available here for me to bug 
You have people at the conference who are independent contractors, press, employees of huge companies (Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, etc), and we even found some more people from Universities this year! A very diverse group of people, but all coming together to learn about something that we all (maybe not all, but most) are passionate about. I know its geeky, but I think it’s cool, so shut up
The best part about the networking is knowing that other people out there are dealing with the same kind of problems that you are. Whether it is technical or political, you have people who understand your viewpoint, which is rare sometimes. If I am trying to figure out how to get some module in ZF to work, it’s nice to know that I can contact the dude that wrote the thing.
Anyway, enough rambling. I’m off to have breakfast with the VP of Global Services for Zend to talk about our PHP/ZF classes that we have been teaching.
Gooooooooooood morning ZendCon08! We had a really good day yesterday…made lots of contacts, heard some good talks. Today should be more of the same, except it’s a pretty big day for us. We are going to be doing a presentation at the Un-Con today, so hopefully we will do pretty good with that. Anyway, on to the talks…
Wil Sinclair – The Future of PHP Applications
One thing I (Garrison) have noticed at this conference that wasn’t quite as prevalent at the previous ones, is the focus on the speed of development as a necessary component of today’s world of PHP application development. The “matter of weeks, not months” mantra has been said in at least 4 of the sessions I’ve been so far. I’m proud to say that we’ve reached this bar for the most part. We’ve been able to write robust applications in 4 weeks that would have previously taken 4 or more months to finish. Wil gave an overview of the transition from how people used to write applications to how they’re done currently and I identified with every bit of it because we’ve made the exact same transitions. But the moral of the story is, applications have to be finished incredibly quickly or else they’ll never reach the market in time. Being able to develop very rapidly, while having a high degree of maintainability and scalability is something we’ve been working toward and it appears to be the right direction.
This is a little late, seeing as how we just finished our presentation, but I thought it was worth the additional blog post.
Last week, Kieth Casey (CaseySoftware), organizer of the Zend Un-Conference, Facebooked me and asked if we would be interested in doing a presentation at the Un-Con. He was envisioning a “how we put best practices into real development work”, which worked for us.
He put us in touch with Shaun Farrell, who works as a contractor for the Library of Congress. He was going to be on this panel with us, as his challenges were a little different than ours, but kinda down the same path.
Anyway, we just finished our talk and it went pretty well. There were like 30 people in there, which I think was pretty good. The room was full, and we had some good questions. Maybe next year we will be able to present for a normal session, but you gotta start somewhere right?
Today is the first day of the rest of your life….ok, so not that dramatic, but it is the first day of the conference. Here is today’s rundown…
Keynote – Harold Goldberg (CEO of Zend)
For the second year, Harold Goldberg, CEO or Zend, opened the conference. His keynote focused on how PHP is moving into the enterprise world. He talked a lot about real-world companies that are moving away from things like Java and into the PHP realm with the use of Zend Framework.
A very interesting thing was how PHP adoption is growing, and how that affects us as PHP developers. There are now more jobs in more places for PHP developers, and a lot of those jobs are starting to show up in the corporate world. He also said that they are seeing a rise in Zend Certified Engineers (40% increase since last year), and that those ZCE’s are commanding 25-30% more in compensation. That’s good news, since Garrison and Jason are ZCE’s and Hua-Ying is taking the test at the conference.
The next big announcement was that Zend is going to offer a Zend Framework certification. Apparently there are already job postings requesting ZFCE’s, and it was just announced today, so there is a big demand for folks with these skills. That is also a good thing for our group since we use ZF heavily. To me, that means that we are on the right track with our focus and direction.
The majority of the rest of the keynote was focused on Zend’s partnerships with companies like Eclipse, PHPUnit, IBM, Adobe, etc. All that tying back into the main focus of PHP in the Enterprise Environment.