This post is embarrassingly late, but I attended PHP Appalachia 2008 back from October 11-14 in Pigeon Forge, TN.
Anyways, I gave my Rickroll To Go talk, which was well-received as noted in the C7Y Ramblecast.
Anyways, thanks to all of my fellow attendees! It was a ball. See you there in 2009!
As I write this, I’m in flight back to Atlanta from the first annual Schematic Technology Summit, which was held in San Jose, Costa Rica at the La Condesa hotel and resort.
What an incredible event. Everyday, I get to work with all sorts of smart, passionate technical minds from many disciplines. The Schematic Technology Department is made up of about 90 people across our New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Minneapolis, London, and San Jose, Costa Rica offices. The past four days have seen all of those 90 people in the same place — quite an accomplishment!
An equally impressive accomplishment is that we had over 70 presentations from 45 speakers across seven different disciplines. Internally, we’re made up of PHP, Java, .Net, Silverlight, Flash, and HTML/Javascript developers. We also have a team of Solutions Architects across the globe, as well as Quality Assurance Analysts. Also represented was the Schematic Technology Management team, of which I’m a part of, in addition to being the Platform Chair of our Open Source Platforms Group (the PHP team).
We’ve been planning this event since about May of this year. We opened up a call for proposals to all technology Platform Groups, sifted through all of the submissions, chose from them, and worked out a schedule. All of these talks were spread out over six different rooms, ranging from small to large.
As OSPG Platform Chair, I was responsible for all or part of a total of seven different presentations. I presented:
I actually won an award for “most prolific” speaker since I had the largest amount of presentations on the schedule. My fellow OSPG teammates also presented:
Special thanks to all of them for their hard work in proposing talks and ultimately preparing them! For the rest of you that we couldn’t accept, we’ll get you on the books for 2009!
I also attended many other talks (when I wasn’t speaking myself!), such as:
My Atlanta cohorts, Ryan Taylor, Corey Schuman and Brandon Dement spoke on “PixelBender Unleashed,” “WPF,” and “Automation” respectively. Good stuff, guys! ATL represent!
In our spare time, the group could be found in the hotel casino, drinking in one of the bars, or playing ping pong (New York won the first office ping pong tournament!). We also took a group outing to La Paz Waterfall Gardens on Saturday afternoon. We survived the bus ride up, down, and through mountains to reach our destination, which is filled with some amazing waterfalls, monkeys, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other awesome rainforest stuff. We all hiked through the trails and paths winding through the rainforest, checking out a handful of amazing waterfalls. I don’t know about the rest of you Schemers, but that trip reminded me just how out of shape I am. Mowing the yard isn’t enough for exercise!
Also, a huge thanks to our event planners Kimberly Brown and Viria Azofeifa, as well as Yvette Pasqua, Jason Buzzeo, Larry Davidson, and Chris Bray for driving this thing! You all rocked it.
Anyways, just a little wrap-up from me! I’m excited to see how things might come together to hold the second annual Schematicon in 2009! Don’t forget to relive the action on Twitter (#schematicon08 and #squarecon08) and Flickr (schematicon08).
I’m a little late to the party with this one — ZendCon was weeks ago now! For the third year in a row, I attended the Zend PHP Conference, which was in Santa Clara, CA this year. As I write this, I’m on a plane from San Jose, Costa Rica back to Atlanta after having just attended the first annual Schematic Technology Summit.
What can I say? It’s the conference that the entire PHP community looks forward to all year long! This was another great opportunity to connect with old friends and meet some new ones.
This year, Schematic was represented by myself, Pablo Viquez, Robert Swarthout, and Ben Ramsey. Ben and I were both speaking, which makes two years in a row for me.
For the first half of tutorial day, I attended PHP Development best practices by Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Mike Naberezny. In general, I found that I’m already taking part in helping to apply the techniques and practices they presented. It’s always nice to walk away with talks with a “I/we know what we’re doing!” feeling.
During the last half of the day, I attended Jay Pipes “Legend of Drunken Query Master: The Apprentice’s Journey,” which was excellent. It’s been a while since I’ve really had to optimize MySQL queries, tune instances, etc. Jay’s talk was a great refresher on these topics.
He also illustrated some cases in which you’d need to do some strange things to squeeze performance out of MySQL, such as placing most-frequently-used fields in, say, one InnoDB table, while placing the rest of the less-frequently-used values in a separate table — perhaps using InnoDB on your master database, and MyISAM on your slaves. This helps keep the index in the buffer space, which makes for faster lookups.
Now, I get it — you want to squeeze all that you can out of your database — but, in my opinion, practices like this are just strange and unorthodox. I’d be willing to use them as needed, but frankly, I’d only resort to them if I REALLY had to. If it was a matter between my database consistently falling flat on its face with performance issues, then I’d consider. In the meantime, I’ll tend to stick to more standard database design practices.
During the regular conference days, I attended some great talks. I always walk away from ZendCon somewhat inspired and energized to sink my time into PHP-based activities, such as unit testing, continuous integration, and tinkering with the latest and greatest Zend Framework components.
In particular, I need to polish up my Zend_Log_Writer_Mail proposal, and pay some attention to the recent comments and suggestions. Granted, it’s a trivial component being proposed, but if I can improve on it a bit to make it more useful to a wider array of developers, I’m certainly committed to doing so. It’d be great to get this class into the 1.7 release of Zend Framework!
Of particulate note was Terry Chay‘s Unconference talk. Every time I see Terry speak, I have another one of my “We know what we’re doing!” moments. Maybe it’s easy to nod my head and agree with most everything Terry says, but really, his talks always verify that both my personal thought process and that of my employer, Schematic, is generally in-line and headed in the right direction. I look forward to seeing Terry’s polished up, movie clip-filled version in the coming months!
Also huge props to Keith Casey, this year’s Unconference chair. That schedule was packed full of great talks!
On Tuesday, I presented my new talk, “Rickroll To Go with PHP, WURFL, and Other Open Source Tools.” In general, I think it went well. Did anyone else Rickroll their audience at ZendCon? Doubt it! That talk may have run a tad short, but I didn’t feel right cramming more slides in just for the sake of time. I covered a wide range of material, such as some basics on WURFL, use of FFmpeg for video and audio, and how to use ImageMagick and the imagick extension when optimizing images for consumption by mobile devices. This talk serves a niche area of the PHP community, so I’d love to be able to refine and repurpose it for some other conferences in 2009.
As has become the custom, Twitter was all over #zendcon this year! Between coordinating group outings, looking for mini-DVI-to-VGA adapters for MacBooks, and reporting the state of hungover colleagues, Twitter is the Swiss Army Knife tool of PHP conferences! If you’re not on it, get with the program!
Also, as has become another custom, we tend to get news of various PHP’ers jumping ship to join other companies in the weeks after ZendCon. This year’s big headline is Cal Evans’ move from Zend to ibuildings as the Director of their new PHP Center of Expertise. Congrats, Cal and ibuildings! Cal, the South will miss you!
But, that’s about it! I look forward to both speaking at and attending ZendCon 2009.