Dutch PHP Conference 2008 :) +20%

I wanted to finish this post last weekend, But i was feelings so bad (flew). I haven’t really been near my computer untill now. So here goes. Last Saturday me, Bart and Robbert headed over to the second edition of the Dutch PHP Conference. After getting the name tags. We headed over to the main room. Where i scored a nice PHPWoman t’ shirt for my wife :) Not much later the first keynotes started.

The first keynote was by Zeev. Which i had high hopes for. It’s a opportunity to hear one of the guys that made PHP to what it is. Give a talk. It was mainly about the history of PHP. Because nobody in the audience seemed to know about it. Or they just wanted to hear it from the master himself. I don’t know. I enjoyed the talk.

After Zeev Marco Tabini hit the stage. Which was pretty funny. This guy has a way of talking. And his slides connect to that perfectly. It was amusing and interesting. Although i had some problems getting comfortable in the main room chairs. the name of the talk was “PHP and the Taste of Mayo”. And it was mainly about keeping it simple. And choosing the right tools for the job.

After the keynotes it was time for lunch. Because i was feeling a bit sick i wasn’t really hungry. But the food was good. All kinds of sandwiches and the tasty saucijzenbroodjes. Just good variety. Outside we sniffed some fresh air.. And tried to figure out to which talk we wanted to go. Since we don’t do anything with unit testing at the moment. We decided to go to Sebastian Bergmann‘s talk about PHPUnit 3.3.

Sebastian quickly skimmed through the basics of PHPUnit. How to create a test class and the use of mock objects. After that he showed some new features in PHPUnit 3.3. One of wich is based on behavior based development. It was a story based testing. With the use of method chaining phrases can be build to execute the execute scenario’s. I have to say it’s a strange way. And the code looks kinda weird. I had the feeling Sebastian was also not to happy about it. I guess he tries to keep his users happy. He dropped some words about a new project. I think it was PHP Depend. But i kinda forgot. Couldn’t find any info about it on the net. So we keep that for another time. I had the feeling Sebastian was rushing a bit. He didn’t have enough time. But it was good talk. His slides can be found here.

After the first talk we took something to drink and walked around a bit. Waiting for the next talk to start. We decided to go to Mayflower and Sektioneins security talk. Which was something different then i expected. It was not as technical as i had hoped. But it touched some nice topics. I had hoped Stefan Esser would be there also. But Johann-Peter Hartmann did a great job. The talk was mainly was about Risk assessment. How to identify risk points in your application flow. And how to anticipate to those points. The talk also showed some malicious web trends. Some nice graphs that hacking web applications is not for fun anymore.

When the second talk was over we went outside. i was feeling pretty bad. Seems every time when there’s a conference i come down with the flew. Was thinking about going home. But decided i didn’t want to miss the last two talks. So we headed back to the main room. After getting a nice cold coke. We picked some nice seats and waited for Stefan Priebsch to begin his talk about PHP 5.3 and PHP 6. This was one of the best talks i think. it was pretty interesting to hear about some new features. Although i knew about most. There was a bit of e discussion about namespaces. Some guy in the audience was screaming for attention. Although he made some points. I had the feeling i was sitting near a real life troll :) Anyway Stefan’s talk was good. A bit of irony about the up coming PHP 6 with Unicode support. And some new features in PHP5.3 like, Garbage Collection, SPL, Late static binding which was very interesting. With some nice examples. I ended with a small plug for his new book. Which you can buy over at PHP|Architect. The slides for his talk can be found here.

The final talk was given by Terry chay (the PHP terrorist). I looked forward to this talk. I heard and read a lot about his way of presenting in front of a crowd. And i can tell you. This guy rocks. The talk was of course not without some Ruby on Rails bashing. I had to say this was one hell of an inspiring talk. The talk was titled The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the internet Architecture. His talk was about what he called the four s’s (Stability, Scalability, Speed, and Security). How to build an application the right way. From the bottom up. I didn’t find any slides to the talk yet. They will probably pop up somewhere.

After the last talk ended. All speakers got on stage and received some goodies and a big applause from the audience. The conference was over. And because i wasn’t feeling to well. I went home immediately. Overall i think it was a great day. I learned some new thing. Witch for me is the main thing about conferences. On our way out we picked up a goody bag. Which had a very nice t’ shirt. And some promotion materials. Thanks to all the people who made this happen. And hope till next year

By now some pictures are apearring on flickr.