Tower Of Power

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...

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.