ZendCon 2010 Wrap up

Last week Santa Clara was buzzing PHP at ZendCon 2010, the PHP conference of the year where vendors and developers unite to talk about, learn and see new innovations and best practices in the world of PHP.

I was invited by Zend to present 3 talks: "Unit Testing after Zend Framework 1.8" (http://joind.in/2243), "Why Zend Framework powers the enterprise" (http://joind.in/2264) and "Improving QA on PHP development projects" (http://joind.in/2279).
From the reactions I received on joind.in, I'm glad I faced the audience and shared my knowledge. My goal was reached as I merely got the audience interested in the subjects I presented.

At the end of the conference I was also invited by Cal Evans to sit in the closing keynote panel to discuss "The ROI of community involvement" (http://joind.in/2288) alongside community icons like Ben Ramsey, Keith Casey, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Josh Holmes.
As it's hard for me to stop talking about community involvement, I do think this panel discussion was a good initiative to start a dialogue with business owners to think about contributing and participating in open-source projects and how they can benefit from having their developers use company time to work on these open-source projects.

I also took charge of this year's ZendUncon and it turned out to be a huge success. We had uncon speakers that discussed a variety of topics, but I did see a lot of database and unit testing topics. We even had joind.in founder Chris Cornutt participating through Skype the round table discussion "What is joind.in and why does it matter".
Zend offered the uncon speaker with the most votes on joind.in a prize, being a lifetime Zend Studio license. This prize was given to Bulat Shakirzyanov (@avalanche123) with his talk on Unit Testing who had the most votes at the end of ZendCon 2010.

In general, it was a great conference. A bit cloudy for most people (as reported on Topnews, ComputerWorld and DataMation), but the atmosphere was awesome. I met a lot of new friends and got rejoined with as I call my PHP family. Zend has done a great job releasing new versions of their products (Zend Studio, Zend Server, Zend Framework) and their new website. We got a good discussion on Zend Framework 2.0 and where the framework is heading towards. And I learned a lot speaking to people in the hallway.

For me, it was exhausting but it was all worth the effort. Who knows, we might see some of the unknown uncon speakers appearing at an international conference somewhere in the world. I had a blast!!!

I would like to say thank you to Zend, the sponsors, the venue staff and to all ZendCon attendees who have participated in the ZendUncon sessions and have rated the talks they attended on joind.in (http://joind.in/event/ZendCon2010 and http://joind.in/event/ZendUncon2010). If you were there but didn't rate any talks yet, do so now. Speakers and conference organizers want your feedback to do a better job the next time. So, help them to help you better!

See you all at a PHP conference near you!

Comments

  1. Thanks, I've heard a lot about Zendcon.

    David.

    ReplyDelete

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