So I’m sitting here in Skien recalling the last 2 days in Amsterdam so I can write something really intelligent about it but I’m being somewhat foggy on some of the details :) Actually half of this blog was written after Skien since my laptop crashed mid way through this blog *sigh* – So I was even more foggy for a while.
Zeev’s keynote was kinda like what Andi went on about back in Chicago – Saw the same slides in some case, history of PHP, where we are going and fun things like that, I know some people liked it but I must admit I was not impressed per se, maybe because I have seen Andi do most of this before ? Who knows.
Anyway on stage came Marco Tabini, a person I’ve never seen talk before and he had a interesting keynote title, Software and the taste of mayo, and I must say I was really happy with seeing how it turned out. Marco managed to pull off being his usual funny self and still get his point across, he talked about how software and services get over engineered, bloated and simply poorly written, for comparision he used mayo – real mayo is made out of three ingredients where as for example hunts mayo is made out of 50 or so ingredients which can more often than not be reflected to software and how they are handled. A good talk.
Next up was Derick with his eZc talk where he went on to explain what the whole concept is, introduced what I like to call their better components and show example but 45 mins didn’t make it justice, Ivo make the talks longer next year! And add another conf day :) This talk convinced me to look deeper into ez components and use more components than I already am.
PHP Security by Johann, I was expecting something different than what he talked about – It ended up being more like, not sure what to call it, a very dry university professor lecture, a lot of stats about why people are exploiting web apps, now and 5 years ago – names of some ways to run a security audit and basics about how you should do them. It didn’t catch my attention and I was really bored in there but people around me seemed very happy with it and thus I must deem it a success even tho I felt I was in 101 class.
The last talk I attended was Ivo Jansch session about Enterprise PHP Development. In there he used a nice metaphor about blocks to build a house in accordance to development , I must say I enjoyed the talk since he was talking about this I tend to ponder on a lot in projects I’m involved in but I was quite surprised that people in the talk seemed to find some of the topics Ivo touched on to be new to them. Good thing Ivo just published a book about it at PHP Arch.
I was going to end this blog post with something along the lines of “make the topic more advanced for next year around” but evidentally that should not happen since in many of the talks I looked into people seemed generally puzzled but I did hear the random “I felt I was back in pre-school”, so my advice to the conf holders, do a mix of both, add a extra conf day and everyone will be happy.
Terry Chay had his usual closting keynote, I was not all that satisfied how less explicit it has gotten recently, we need to get him drunk before these keynotes – Or he has to make a new one since he might be getting bored of this one but I still enjoy it :)
That night we went out for drinks and fun and stayed out for a looooong time, basic after conf stuff really but it meant we were a bit woobly the day after when we went sightseeing in Amsterdam, where we went on the canal bus and saw a lot of Amsterdam – Really beautiful and after that we went for a good stroll in this amazingggggg weather, wow I almost extended my stay just because of it – thankfully the weather was good in London too when I came back :)
Anyway this is a rather short wrap up but should give a good idea that I really liked this conference, good to see we still have a decent conference in Europe (unconfs not included in this statement :P they always rock) and I’m going again next year, hands down and so should you!
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 