PHP BNL 12

Last weekend my co-workers were kind enough to take me along for the two-day crazy that is the PHP Benelux conference 2012. 

I visited:

• Ian Barber’s opening keynote
• David Zülke’s intro on Hadoop with PHP
• Derick Rethan’s speech on the MongoDB PHP extension
• Seb Marek’s explanation of software metrics
• The Ramada plaza for a way too short night
• Jordi Boggiano’s explanation of Redis
• Rowan Merewood’s talk about estimates
• Tobias Schlitt presenting writing testable code
• Juozas Kaziukenas introducing Doctrine 2 and finally
• Jeroen Keppens telling us all about PHP in the dark

That is one high density of information – and I didn’t even get the chance to visit the earlier workshops or closing keynotes! I’m happy with my choices. Even though I didn’t enjoy every talk I’ve learned how to better pick my talks, what not to use for my next project and even during the less useful talks there’s still the occasional gem of info that you don’t want to miss out on.

What did I get out of it?

I’m pretty up-to-date with most of what’s going on in the PHP world. That means that most technical talks are old news for me. Still I decided to visit the talks on Redis, Mongo and Doctrine, because we are looking into which new(-ish) technologies we can use to solve some of our problems. I now know I really don’t like Mongo, I really do like Redis and my reservations concerning Doctrine were waaay off. Score!

I’ve also gotten some great validation from talks on metrics and testing. Over the past months I’ve been studying software quality and the talks held almost nothing new for me, but the occasional gem of insight only experience can bring.

Some of the speakers had a harder time than others to get their info across. Be it language barriers, nerves or just not that X-factor presentation skills, it can be tough to focus for an hour. But especially Rowan Merewood was just excellent and he made it so easy for me to stay in the moment. Good info density, little bit of humour and most importantly: he reacted to what the audience seemed to indicate and picked up the pace when we were slipping.

Room for improvement

And that brings me to what I think the speakers, in general, could do even better. Every single talk I’ve witnessed was given by a speaker who knew his subject inside out and who was really enthusiastic about it. But it seems to me that sometimes the enthusiasm of the subject overshadowed the value that speakers were bringing to their audiences.

Several talks were laden with history and background. That’s fine if we have half a day, but when you only have an hour and you spend twenty minutes on history, I as a listener get twenty less minutes of your awesome personal insights and extensive experience. History is fun and can certainly be important, but I think that’s for blog posts, wiki pages and git archeology parties. So I would say to the speakers: What value is what you are telling bringing to your audience?

Please don’t change this

What I think is out of this world is very subtle. It gets thrown around effortlessly, carelessly even. “You can do X, but you shouldn’t because Y. Do Z rather and you will be fine”. These sort of in between statements, not even on the slides, are what makes a conference worth it to me. Please speakers, keep sharing these little insights, these little nuggets of gold that are attained by experience and experience alone.

Thanks to the organization of #phpbnl12, thanks to all the speakers (even those I didn’t visit – my coworkers did so I’m not missing a thang) and thanks Procurios for sending me! And reader if you haven’t already, don’t forget to send your feedback on joind.in.

Ps.
If you are reading this and you remember being completely owned at bowling Friday night, I forgot your names but would like to know more about you and your work :) poke me on twitter some time!