I felt like I should take a break from finishing up my multi-part javascript series to rehash some points being made recently by Keith Casey and Chris Cornutt about making the most of your N-th conference (and in particular, ZendCon).

My first ever professional conference (ignoring BarCamps) was last year’s ZendCon. I showed up in Santa Clara not knowing anyone except for a few brief appearances on #phpc (freenode).

What made ZendCon absolutely enjoyable was indeed what everyone is suggesting to you: the hallway track.

I could have easily attended sessions then hid in my room until the next day, yet I chose to go out to the social events and thanks to that decision, ZendCon ’08 remains currently one of my fondest memories.

It’s one thing to sit down and listen to talks from famous PHP developers, those that I read about all the time (or read their books in many cases). It’s a whole other beast to find yourself sharing a beer with them in some random “English Pub” while getting your ass kicked at trivia (I still have the beer glasses that were given to me by the real winners).

And these events didn’t happen because I’m some modest uber-genius (I am by no means modest), I’m famous, or even particularly well respected (“He’s not stupid” is as gracious as a comment as I could want in a programming community).

They happened because someone yelled “Pub Crawl!” and, dammit, I was there.

They happened because I struck up conversations with random people.

They happened because I got in religious flame wars with random people. (Ask me about the time, thought not at ZendCon, where I launched into a tirade against CakePHP with who I later found out was the founder of CakePHP)

As it has been reiterated time and time again, this conference is not really about the sessions (it’s a success if there’s just 1 talk that you go to). It’s about the people you meet and the friendships you foster.

In summation, I have a list of goals for you, my loyal readers that are attending ZendCon:

1. Start a conversation with a random person in a hallway
2. Find and say hi to an author of one your PHP books. Tell them how awesome the book has been
3. Attend at least 1 UnCon session
4. Attend at least 1 post-session social (keep track on Twitter and ask your fellow attendees for info)
5. Find me and introduce yourself

This is a post to make sure anyone interested in development, design, or new media entrepreneurship shows up to MiniBarBCS this Friday starting at 5pm. The event is being held on the 5th floor of the Varisco Building in Bryan, Texas (219 N. Main St., Bryan, TX 77803).

So far the proposed topics cover everything from iPhone development to “Design for Developers” to .NET to PHP, Ruby, Coworking, and anything else under the sun.

So if you’re around the area this Friday, show up and join in the fun! Just make sure to RSVP in the wiki linked above (the password/invite key is “c4mp”) or the Facebook event.

So I kinda had a thing going about blogging during ZendCon but lost it, so I might as well just do a single day wrap up.

So ZendCon turned out to be completely worth it, even if only for the chance to meet in person a lot of the core PHP community and then drink semi-copiously with them.

The talks were good, though most of them were either more basic than I would have liked or really indepth (/me thinks back to Sara’s PHP Extension Writing talk, though that was more “few php developers gets this deep” than indepth/complicated).

The uncon was nice, which of course I’d like it given my love for barcamps, refreshes, and generally community driven and adhoc events.

The Yahoo party started out awkward given that one expects an open bar after paying $500+ for tickets to a conference, however from what I gathered it really wasn’t so much Yahoo’s fault more the hotel’s. I won the raffle for the “Day with Rasmus” prize and felt bad ’cause when one of the Yahoo girls came to me and to have me verify my information, I told them my email (which was a gmail account) was correct but if they still have trouble to just google my first and last name since I dominate the first page for my name.

My only problem with ZendCon is that it ended…

Since it isn’t up on refreshbcs.org yet I’ll repost the announcement from the listserv:

Where: Murphy’s Law (upstairs) [Google Map]
When: October 1st 7PM (Happy Hour starting at 5)
Speaker: Michelle Greer

We’ve been quiet for a while but it’s time to get this show back on the road. We’ve got several months worth of great speakers lined up and we’re starting this thing off with a bang. Michelle Greer has been kicking ass and taking names in the Austin area for quite some time and she has no plans to stop anytime soon. Come listen to her speak about how she uses social media to institute real-life change in the world around us.

Making Social Media Matter:
How Social Media Turns Everyday Citizens into Superheroes

In an age where anyone can publish anything for the cost of hosting a WordPress blog, the means for spreading ideas has never been easier or cheaper. Learn how people have used social media to mobilize people at rates never seen before in history, and how these tools make it easy for you to bring about positive change for your community.

-> Michelle Greer
-> Web Marketing Strategist
-> http://www.michellesblog.net
-> 512.294.3909

If any of you happen to be around college station on the 1st of October, or can make it, I highly suggest you show up to the refresh meetings. Even if the particular topic isn’t your cup of tea (if you are a developer and it’s a design topic, etc.) it’s a great place to connect with people (obviously from the BCS area) and get educated on the happenings on the other side of the fence.

Spoon is both a gentleman AND a scholar.

(And caseysoftware is awesome for the pic)

Turned out to be a fairly exciting day. I woke up late wondering why my alarms didn’t go off, just barely got to lunch and regretted missing Jay Pipes‘ talk.

Sara Golemon gave an interesting introduction to PHP extension writing. I bow to her vastly superior C-fu.

I already discussed a few talks that I went to yesterday as well.

Ended the night doing a pub crawl with some people (hung out with Jay Pipes at the end which is what caused me to regret missing his talk).

Eli White gave a talk called “The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development”.

He compares software development methodologies to the old TV show Knight Rider, in that the main character, Michael Knight, was average and ordinary except for the fact that he had an applicable toolset for what he needed to do (KITT).

Eli talks about how while locking yourself into a programming language (company wise) is okay in that when you hire you know that the candidate has to know at lease a finite number of languages. But you shouldn’t force employees to use locked in tools. If they like their own editor debugger combo, let them use it because they will be faster, the code will still work the same.

He goes over different tools you’ll use for different purposes. Editors, debuggers, load testers, etc.

The movie clips are great, which you unfortunately don’t get on the downloadable presentation.

Elizabeth Smith discussed to a really interesting PECL extension, pecl_http. I can do request pooling!

She also discussed pdo_user that allows you to create PDO drivers in userland (PHP).

Good overview on PECL packages. It makes me sad that they have really cool extensions like the operator overload extension and I can use them because I have to worry about install bases of other users :( Damned shared hosts.

It’s here!