What I took home from ZendCon 2013

ZendCon 2013 Registration Booth

ZendCon 2013 is over. I had a really great time there meeting new people, attending great talks and hang out with old friends. And wow, this was an awesome conference!

Workshop quality assurance for php projects - ZendCon 2013 from Michelangelo van Dam

It all started on tutorial day where I was giving my workshop "Improving QA on PHP Development Projects". The workshop went very well and I received a lot of positive feedback afterwards. Afterwards I talked to some of the attendees of my workshop and showed them a few more things that were possible to improve quality and put all things in a chain so you can implement a continuous deployment workflow. Little did I know what Zend had up their sleeve.

Opening Keynote ZendCon 2013

On the first official day of ZendCon, the opening keynote was one that shook the earth for PHP developers. Their first announcement was all about Apigility, an open source API builder based on Zend Framework 2 that allows everyone to create true REST API's in an easy to use interface.

Apigility Demo from Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Vimeo.

Demo of Apigility done for the keynote at ZendCon 2013, and used to show the various features of Apigility, including API creation, service creation, versioning, content negotiation, and HTTP negotiation.

The second revelation of ZendCon was their Continuous Delivery Blueprint for Zend Server. This allows ZS customers to set up and improve their continuous delivery (deployment) flow by simplified scripts that hook into an impressive list of supported automation platforms (like Jenkins, Bamboo), infrastructure platforms (like AWS, VMWare, RightScale, …) and application management platforms (like Nagios and Tivoli). This all simplified the whole delivery process I described in my workshop, as long as you're using Zend Server for your application management.

Attendees registering for the ZendUncon sessions

This year I was also in charge of ZendUncon, the "uncon" besides the main conference tracks. And again it may be called a true success! 21 talks were given by known speakers but also new ones who did a remarkable job presenting there. And almost each session attracted at least 10 or more attendees who all loved these uncon tracks.

I also presented my "Community works for business too" talk at this ZendUncon where I have given business owners or employees enough arguments to convince whoever is in power to invest in open-source initiatives and community events and benefit from doing so in more than one way.

Community works for business too - ZendCon 2013 from Michelangelo van Dam

My second official talk "UA testing with Selenium and PHPunit" I presented at the main stage on the second day. The rest of the time at ZendCon I was attending talks, collecting swag and talking to other folks.

PHP is a lot of fun, and the "Big debate" lightning talk was a very funny way to express how this technology is being maintained. Here are the recordings I made.

And as I said, I also got a lot of swag I needed to take back home. Fortunately I had a second bag I could rely on.

My collected swag from the ZendCon

So now back home I have a lot of information to process, try out and follow up on. I had a great time and this year's ZendCon was a true pleasure to be at. Thanks to all organisers and staff for setting up such a wonderful conference where the fine balance was made between community and corporate. I had a blast and I'll be there again next year.