ZendCon 08 review

ZendCon 2008, the PHP conference organized by Zend Technologies Ltd. was held this year in Santa Clara California. About 700 attendees came to see over 60 sessions (and 20 uncon sessions), with at least 25% non-US visitors (ref. closing keynote by Mark De Visser).

Tutorial Day
The first day of ZendCon is Tutorial Day, where half a day is reserved for talks about a specific topics. I attended the "PHP Developer Best Practices" by Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny for the morning session and "SQL Query Tuning" by Jay Pipes in the afternoon.

ZendCon: Day 1
After the keynote speach "How PHP leaders are transforming high-impact PHP applications", the series of sessions started, including the unconference sessions.

My personal list

• "Getting Started with Zend Framework" by Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• "Scaling PHP applications with Zend Platform" by Shahar Evron
• "Top Zend Studio Secrets" by Guy Gurfinkel
• "Elegant ways of handling PHP errors and exceptions" by Eddo Rotman

I attended also the Uncon round table discussion ORM by Stefan Priebsch, where a discussion was made about ORM and best practices on how to achieve ORM goals with or without the use of a framework.

Afterwards a Zend Certified Engineers party was organized.

ZendCon day 2:
The keynote speach about Magento e-commerce suite given by Wil Sinclair and the people of Magento, showed how Zend Framework was used for building a robust e-commerce suite.

I also enrolled for the Zend Framework Certification exam (ZFCE) at 10am, but failed it on Zend Search Lucene, Zend Mail and Zend XmlRpc (so I know what I should study for).

My list of sessions:

• "PHP clustering solutions: Zend View" by Alexander Abramovich
• "Building RIA with ZF and PHP" by John Coggeshall
• "Zend Layout and Zend View" by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Ben Ramsey organized an uncon session about PHP User Groups, where an open discussion was made between organizers of user group meetings to see what can be done to improve the quality of meetings and how user groups could combine forces for content, guest speakers and such.

There was a "Meet the team" thing going on, but I missed it due to great conversations with other developers.
There was also a Yahoo! party, with pretty women from Yahoo! and cool coctails.

ZendCon day 3:
The last day only lasted until the afternoon, but nontheless a great day.

My sessions:

• "Scaling Mozilla's websites with PHP" by Laura Thomson
• "End-to-end web testing with Selenium" by Stefan Priebsch
• "I need more servers ! What do I do ?" by Maurice Kherlakian

The closing keynote was given by Mark De Visser and David J. Neff.

My conclusion:
ZendCon was the best conference ever, where I've made new friends, seen old friends, learned a whole lot and got better insight in processes, best practices, tools and other things.

A minor less positive note: the lack of coffee during the day (and not only during the break in the morning and afternoon) was something many people blogged, tweeted and chatted about.

As a last remark: If you weren't able to attend this year's conference, try to make it to next year's conference !

Cal Evans rocked !