A great 2009 !

It's that time of year again where one looks back to all the things that have happened in the past 12 months. 2009 has to be the most thrilling, fastest ride ever and I'm really surprised to see it's nearly the end of this year.

PHP
The most thrilling part of 2009 was the release of PHP 5.3 on June 30. With this release, PHP has risen to a new level of development implementing some long awaited features like DateTime, namespaces, closures, gotos (who wants to use that ?!?), late static binding and an improved garbage collection. Also new extensions were added to this release like ext/phar, ext/fileinfo and ext/intl.
I want to express my gratitude to all those developers who have made this release possible and to all the participants of PHP Test Fest for making their contributions worth the while.

Zend Framework
It's also worth mentioning that Supreme Allied Commander Matthew Weier O' Phinney, his team and all developers around the world have done a great job improving Zend Framework. With the release of Zend Framework 1.8, lot's of things changed within the way applications are being bootstrapped and provided a more flexible way to deploy feature rich applications with a very modular structure.

PHP Conferences
For me personal it was a very exciting year where I was speaking at some great conferences on stage and in uncon sessions (thank you Keith!). If budget allows it, I'll be attending these conferences again in 2010.
One conference will be added to this list in 2010 since I'll be co-organizing it: PHPBenelux Conference.
If you ever want to catch up on the hottest game in PHP, be sure to check out these and other great PHP conferences on the PHP website. You'll learn so much from the conference itself, the speakers and the audience itself, it's really worth the money.


Macq Electronique
Since March of this year I've been working as a PHP/Zend Framework consultant for Macq Electronique, a hardware manufacturer in Brussels that provides hardware solutions for governments (like automated traffic panels, speed enforcement cameras, tunnel control and pump installation monitors). I would like to thank the company for giving me inside view of these infrastructures and I'm excited to work with them again in 2010.


Thank you !
I would like to express my gratitude to the following people who have thought me a few valuable lessons that I can use in my personal and professional life:
  • Cal Evans:
    Cal, to you we now have our own PHP conference in January. Without your support, advise and never ending belief in us, we weren't able to pull it off. Thank you !
  • Matthew Weier O'Phinney:
    Matthew, although we never had the chance to sit down and discuss things I do want to thank you for all the good work you have done for Zend Framework and the PHP Community. If it wasn't for you, I'd still be stuck writing crappy code with code replication and re-inventing the wheel all over again. Thank you !
  • Keith Casey:
    Keith, thanks to you I was able to talk about stuff that matters to me and being able to inspire people to become interested in things like SPL and Unit Testing. Thank you !
  • Stefan Koopmanschap:
    Stefan, although it seems I've been giving you lots of advice this year, you have shown me what a true spirit means. With your enormous passion for PHP and your ideas to promote PHP in ways that I never could think possible, I owe you so much. Thank you my friend !
  • Chris Cornut:
    Chris, I would like to thank you for giving us Joind.in. With it's simple interface and it's purpose it has given me so much feedback on how to improve my skills as a speaker. Without it, I would never known what areas I could improve myself. So thank you very much for your efforts !
Conclusion
2009 was a great year and I'm sorry to see it end. But a new year is around the corner and who knows, it might bring even more excitement and fulfillment. Anyways, I wish you all a very happy new year and I hope to see you again at a conference somewhere in the world.

Comments

  1. Wow, I am honored by your words Mike. Thanks a lot. But you have been one of my main inspirations for thinking up ways of promoting PHP :)

    Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, I'm just happy the community has found Joind.in has been so useful! Really, I'm the one that should be thanking the commmunity - without them the site wouldn't be what it is...and now that it's open sourced, more people are getting involved in whole new (to the site) way :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm humbled that you call me out in this post -- hopefully we can rectify the "we never had the chance to sit down and discuss things" part of your comment this year!

    ReplyDelete

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