My maiden voyage

Don’t worry. This article isn’t nearly as sexy as the title implies. No, rather I visited my first time ever congress: PFC11.

Saturday September 17th, starting at about 9am, the conference hosted a series of talks concerning PHP and related web technologies. Topics varied from tech updates to PHP internals to CSS. I will go into more detail on the talks I visited later.

I enjoyed most of the talks, even though I didn’t learn too much. It was a good chance to meet people and talk about our mutual interests, problems and of course solutions. As such the after-talk discussions were particularly interesting and it was obvious which talks were about ‘fun tech’ and which talks concerned common issues. I took the chance to thank the speakers and talk to them, whenever possible, which added a lot of value for me as well.

My experience was very positive; I will definitely visit more congresses if I get the chance. However, where the ‘Php Freakz Congres’ only costs €37.50, others can be as expensive as several hundreds of euro’s.

The talks I visited

Sorry Nick Belhomme, Juozas Kaziukenas, Robin Poort, Jeroen van Dijk, Joshua Thijssen and Leon Renkema; I didn’t see yours.

Michelangelo van Dam, Community works!

@DragonBe talked about how communities come together to solve various problems and how you can become an (active) part of the PHP community. Whether you’re working on PHP, a framework, or nothing technical at all – there’s always something you can do.

The talk was a bit chaotic and difficult to follow at times, but spot on. I am guilty as charged. I’ve looked into participating to something, some time, but have always felt like I am either not good enough to add value or felt overwhelmed and lost, not knowing where to begin. I definitely feel like I want to become more participative in the community after this talk.

Lineke Kerckhofs-Willems, Intro Quality Management

@the_linie talked about the quality of (PHP) software and various areas in which you may be able to improve to gain a higher quality product. The discussion afterwards was particularly interesting and revolved around what a developer can do to convince management and/or team members to introduce quality management.

Lineke had a good and clear story. If she intended in the excellent discussion to ensue, then props to her. If she didn’t, then even more props to her for talking about her personal experience and what others can learn from it. If PHP needs one thing it’s QM! I was told she was nervous, but I barely noticed and it absolutely didn’t bother me. There was nothing to be nervous about, because she did great.

Richard Tuin, Let’s live inside the browser

@Richard_Tuin talked about the future of applications on the web. He explained how web applications on various platforms can be as powerful as native apps for a great set of problems and which difficulties may arise.

Richard has a great composure. Maybe he goes a bit too much with the euh’s and ehm’s, but he didn’t lose track of his story. It was a great presentation overall. I think the overview of the topic was quite complete, but what the story lacked was an overview of external, non-technical stimuli that can influence the future of web apps. Richard is a very engaging speaker and the talk was very entertaining.

Derick Rethans, PHP extensions, what and why?

@derickr gave us a very technical talk about PHP: how to make extensions. He spoke about some of the inner architecture of PHP and where extensions can hook into.

Derick is an amazing speaker. He is very funny, relaxed and insightful wish a dash of healthy nerd. I learned a lot and had a great time. He may have given me the best tip anyone has ever given me: just look at what others before you did and try to copy what you need.

Jurrien Stutterheim, SPL Data Structures and their complexity

Jurriën presented a more academic topic to a largely unacademic crowd. Complexity was only introduced in my third year of uni, but Jurriën managed to give a 20 minute intro and not lose everyone. I was surprised with some of his findings, though being surprised by PHP having things implement differently may be a bit silly.

His satin American English delivered a hugely interesting story. Kudo’s for making a difficult subject understandable in less than half an hour ánd making a point with it in PHP. I still think quality assurance is even more important for PHP, but this topic definitely deserves more attention. The talk itself was quite relaxed and Jurriën expertly answered the few questions that came his way.

Mike van Riel, DocBlox

@mvriel spoke of his documentation generating gem DocBlox. A while before his talk he twittered he would introduce a new feature. After explaining several things about DocBlox, he revealed that the next version of DocBlox will support plug-ins!

Mike came across as very relaxed and confident, convinced of the qualities of his baby. I loved the presentation and wasn’t bored, even though I have been using DocBlox for months already. The code examples in the slides were unreadable, but Mike handled that fine.

Thijs Feryn, Lost in the Cloud

@ThijsFeryn’s talk was at the same time as the talk on MongoDb. I really didn’t feel like going to either, but having toyed around with Orchestra got my attention so I decided to go anyway. Thijs, who calls himself an evangelist, explained how the cloud is not a technology or anything, but simply internet. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other marketing buzzwords are insufficient to explain that the cloud is a way of abstracting the underlying layers away for the developers, so that they can focus on developing.

The other speakers were great, but Thijs is ‘hors category’. If giving presentations were a mmorpg, he would be a lvl 90 paladin. Or orc. I don’t know, I don’t play mmorps, but he absolutely rocked. If you ever get the chance to see him speak, take that chance. The talk was very polished: the slides were high quality, Thijs was very knowledgeable and engaging and he interacted with the audience extremely well.

Diederick van der Knaap, Develop your career!

StarApple, the main sponsor, had a slot too. It was ok, but at this time I was already starting to feel quite tired. I got up at 5:15 (and still almost missed my train!) and hadn’t even had coffee. I quit coffee some time ago, had one bad detox day and then was done with it. My last dentist visit convinced me to quit – basically my teeth were great except for the coffee. I didn’t have any cavities, you know. I never do because my teeth are naturally very strong, but I also brush two or three times a day (electric!) and use toothpicks and mouth wash. I tried flossing but I can’t seem to find a way to floss the teeth in the back very well. I always end up at weird but funny positions before I hurt myself and give up flossing for a couple of weeks again. But now that I’m using these special dentist kind of toothpicks the flossing isn’t that important anyway.

Zeev Suraski: PHP – Status Check

I don’t know who Zev Saruski is, but fortunately when he was announced Zeev Suraski got on stage and had a talk about how PHP is doing. He compared some unscientific statistics with anecdotal evidence and went on to produce a very useful insight.

When he got his iPhone, he told us, he was worried if PHP would have a future in the world. The iPhone universe is filled with apps and he found himself installing apps for all the websites he used. I’ve actually had this discussion with a stubborn client who believed apps were the future and websites were doomed (but who still purchased a website with us). Even when you’re using apps over websites, there still needs to be a server listening and serving at the other end. PHP is far from dead.

Resources

• The official PFCongres website
• PFCongres on joined.in
• The PhpFreakz website
• Freek Lijten on attending conferences
• Tweets about #pfc11