Posts Tagged ‘conference’
November 20th, 2008 | 
Author: UNC Cause 2008 is officially over, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts as far as how the conference went.
UNC Cause is different in many ways to the standard “conference”. It seems a little less formal in lots of ways. Perhaps it’s the lack of keynote, or session tracks, or something I can’t really put my finger on. Either way, it continues to be different than things like ZendCon and the ResNet conference. Here is what was good, and not so good, about UNC Cause 2008:
Posted in 
Tags: 
Day 3, here we come!
Breakfast was good. There was OJ and biscuits this morning. There was also a raffle, but our group didn’t win anything.
Digital Signage with Billboard
We had a vested interest in this session. Andrew Stein from ECE presented about how they have taken our Billboard product and added a few features to satisfy their needs. Lots of good discussion about the reasons for digital signs and how Billboard will help. There were some requests for download links for Billboard, so if you want to download it, you can do that here.
Day 2 recap! Here we go….
Breakfast
Overall, pretty good. One complaint is that there was no juice, just water and coffee.
UNCW Text Message Applications
UNCW is doing some interesting things with texting, although not really revolutionary. Similar to what was done in the last election, they have setup a code that students can use to get information about campus happenings (2 way automated texting, rather than one way only). They have developed some apps that seem to help students get associated with campus (trivia, events, etc). I learned some stuff about the SMS system in general, so it was worth it.
Our entire group is at UNC Cause this year. For those not in-the-know, Cause is a conference for the UNC University system IT people. We will be blogging our sessions, so here goes our recap of day one.
Vendor Fair
I was really surprised at the turnout for the vendor fair. I figured with the economy the way it is, and the common knowledge that the UNC system is going through major budget cuts, that the vendor fair would be sparse. It was actually bigger than the vendor fair at ZendCon 2008, with MUCH better swag. Pen’s must have been on special somewhere, cause everyone had some. AT&T had an awesome glowing ball. And there were sweet football dart things.
Best thing from the vendor fair was the discovery of a company (Notify Technology) that will let me sync my iPhone with my Groupwise calendar. Don’t know if any of our email and calendaring people see our blog or not, but if you do, you guys should get all up on that. We need that if we are going to have to keep using Groupwise.
Garrison and I will be doing a presentation for UNC Cause 2008. We are presenting on “After the Project Project Management”, which is a fancy way of saying talking about how we do what we do, and what tools we use to do it.
Our presentation is on Tuesday at 11:15 in the “Triad West” room, so join us up.
Also, for any of you who are attending Cause, we are gonna use “unccause08″ as our folksonomy, so tweets, blog posts, tags, etc will all be tagged “cause08″. Everybody join in and we will have an easy way to track whats going down!
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.
Right now, our entire team is in Santa Clara CA for ZendCon 2008. The theme for the conference this year is “High Impact PHP”, so that is right down our alley. We are going to be blogging the entire conference about the talks we hear, the people we meet, all sorts of things. It should be a great conference, and I (Jason) am really excited to be here and learn from the “big boys” in our industry.