Zend PHP 5 Certified!

I’m now a Zend PHP 5 Certified as of today, but it didn’t come easily!

1:59 PM:

Dear Brian DeShong,

Thank you for taking the Zend PHP Certification exam but unfortunately you did not pass.
….
Sincerely,

Dhwani Vahia

Shocked, I immediately replied because something seemed to be amiss. I studied for that thing and knocked a number of practice tests out of the park in the days leading up to the exam. I couldn’t have possibly failed!

So, after taking another practice exam (and scoring excellent on six parts, and “pass” on the other six) and emailing the screenshot to Dhwani, she said that she would regrade my exam later in the day.

So…6:31 PM:

Hi Brian,

My sincere apologies – Before regrading your exam, I checked your score. It turns out you did pass after all (your name should have appeared in the Zend Yellow Pages directory as confirmation)- you must have been sent the wrong email by accident.

I am extremely sorry for the mix up, and thanks so much for alerting me of your suspicions. I am having our technical team look into this matter, and will myself be vigilant of the automated emails that are sent out in regards to the exam.

Again, thank you so much for the alert, and I’m extremely sorry for the confusion.

-dhwani

So…victory is mine! Good thing I didn’t suck it up and assume that I failed. Good luck to the rest of my Schematic colleagues! They should be receiving their results in the next day or two…

ZendCon: Final Day (Nov. 2)

Well, day three of the conference was short and sweet. Andrei’s 8:30 talk on PHP 6 and Unicode was good, especially given that I’m not the master of internationalization. Next up was Sebastian Bergmann’s talk on PHPUnit 3, which is totally going to rock…it’ll be out in 2-3 weeks! His talk ran over about 15 minutes (and nobody stopped him). John Coggeshall was up next on the Zend Framework and how to build a basic blog application with it…but he got cut short due to Sebastian’s overrun.

After John, I grabbed my stuff and headed to the airport. It was a great conference, though…was nice to meet some of the people from #phpc on Freenode.

See you all at ZendCon ’07!

ZendCon: Day Two (Nov. 1)

Well, today was day two. Highlights included Ilia’s talk on caching (clever use of output buffering, 404 error handlers, and register_shutdown_function()) and Wez’s talk on PDO. OmniTI’s happy hour was cool, along with the…uhh…very unique “Pirates By The Pool” reception from IBM.

A good day overall! I’m definitely excited to dig into PDO…I’ll never have to write a database abstraction layer again! Woo!

The group from #phpc is downstairs in the bar hanging out, but the karaoke’s SO bad…I may have to skip it if the karaoke persists much later.

Tomorrow’s the last day, though! I leave SJC at 2:00 PM, but can hopefully catch the good stuff before leaving. It’s been a great experience, though…I’ll definitely aim to be back (and speak?) next year.

ZendCon: Day One (Oct. 31)

Welp, day one of the Zend PHP Conference has come to a close. I met some new people today, including a handful of people from #phpc! It’s nice to be able to put faces with names when meeting people in IRC channels and such.

Highlights thus far include Zeev and Andi’s state of the union, Eli White’s (of Digg.com fame) talk on scaling, the chicken wings at the reception, and just all around great talks.

I’m taking my Zend PHP 5 Certification exam at 11:00 AM PST tomorrow…woohoo! I came back up to my room tonight and took one last practice test: I scored “Excellent” on five sections, “Good” on five more, and failed XML/Web Services…big deal…I’m gonna’ pass the real thing with flying colors!

But, off to relax and perhaps sleep soon…my body’s still sort of on east coast time from what I can tell. At least going to bed by 11:00 PM will mean more sleep ahead of another 8:30 AM start time!

‘Night all…see some of you back out there tomorrow (as if anyone really reads my blog…).