Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

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!

I want to make a bit different wrap up than most do, the community aspect with maybe a dash of what I saw as a attendee but mistah Ben Ramsey stole the idea and was quicker to post it ;-)
Ramsey … FAIL
His post is pretty good and sums things up rather nicely so go read it! but I want to take a stab (Stab it! Conf pun intended) at it and hopefully bring my own charm to it.

My trip had the same problem as always when going abroad … My name, but this time around they managed to write Oiormar instead of Thormar like they should have and thus I had the usual fun of being frisked by TSA because they have no idea what Thorn is but hey so it goes, it’s not like my passport has a ASCII verison of my name at the bottom or anything *wave hands for emphizing*

Before leaving for php | tek we inquired on #phpc IRC channel on Freenode how many of the people hanging around would be attending and a whooping 30 people were to show up which translates to roughly 10% of the overall attending people for the whole of php | tek if I got my numbers right, if not then I’m sure Marco will bet me with a stick and correct me :-)
10% of a conference attendees from a single community, to me that feels very impressive and just shows that the community is willing to come together in one place to make the community even more tighter and just make the confs a greate experience and it is always so much fun meeting people in real life that you’ve been talking to for a long time, even many years and you essentially call your comrades.

As Ben pointed out we did a great job coming together as a community at this conference and going behind anything I’ve ever seen before, taking new people under our arms, organizing events during the evenings and the days after / before the conference, the gimmick on the bar we frequent, Shoeless Joe or like I call it, Bootless Bill and just the over all flow between people.

I’d like to congratulate the conference organizers for the excellent idea of having a Rockband evening, it was AWESOME and I met so many new interesting people and I’m sure everyone did, which makes it an even more success, as well as I’d like to give thumbs up for those company sponsored open bars, who ever thought of 2 open bars in one night should get a gold star :-)

Another reason why the community aspect is so important is that we could all sit down together and work on code together, in person or just generally brainstorm about ideas, quick examples are the fact Joshua Eichorn, Greg Beaver (btw he’s not a script! Amazing isn’t it ?) and I could get together for a face to face meeting on the status of PEAR / PEAR2 and work on the new installer as well as the new infrastructure, we probably crammed months worth of code into 3 days on and off coding.

Another excellent example is the fact that we probably managed to bring down Twitter more than once by going bunkers on posting twitters, it was really hard to keep up with Twitter and #phptek on Freenode, which were yet another example of how the community could drag in other conference attendees and interact with them, some people are just generally shy and like to start with such a route.
Anyway so we saw Twitter die more than once and more than twice and more than 40 times and so people just sat down and came up with Stablr.net, admittedly an idea that many people have had before but being able to discuss it in person, with 20+ other smart people interested in the same thing is just amazing.

Then we had the flying elephpant project, parachuting elephpants from really high altitudes.

Just like Ben, I take my hat of to the conference organizers and the people that made this the most fun conference I’ve ever been to, just wow … people justttttt wow, hopefully next years will be even more fun :-)
I’d also like to thank Scott for tolerating me this whole time, if it were not for him then I would probably have slept under some bridge nearby.

Btw. for those that didn’t go with us to Howling at the moon in down town Chicago, next time you are in the area go there, it was a wild night I can tell you, riddled with competitions among the remaining people involving some peoples accents and dancing but thankfully nobody had a camera or such device ;-)
Without a doubt a place we should all go next year to!

I feel like I must mention 2 talks I liked a lot, actually they were both keynotes, the one from Joe Stagner a laid back session where people got to ask him a whole bunch of questions about MS and more, best thing about it was seeing people discussing on IRC what to ask next so we got some really good questions IMHO

And then there was Terry Chay … Terry Terror, first time I saw him present that talk and it was fun as it can get, worth seeing but don’t take your serious hat with you :-)

As anyone can see this is a bit half cooked blog post since it was done on a flight from JFK to Iceland but heck, I think the disorganization just shows how much we did during this one conference.