PHP-Unconference 2008

2008-04-28 11:56:06

Back from the PHP Unconference 2008 in Hamburg, so here's a little review. I arrived a little early so I didn't have to queue up for my checkin, but that problem was also solved soon for the rest. The voting for the suggested talks took a while, so we didn't start before lunch as planned, but at least that gave some time to meet and greet. After lunch I listened to one of Kris' excellent talk about MySQL Performance Tuning of which I'm sure he could've talked 3h more and it still wouldn't have been boring and then Secure PHP installations by Johann-Peter Hartmann which also had some stuff I hadn't thought of and from my impression some folks also had some a-ha experience.

In the evening we had some beers (or what they call beer in Hamburg) and excellent Chili Con Carne in the Recycel Bar. This went along with more chatting about the talks, own projects and PHP in general.

The second day started with Judith Andresen's talk about Intranets where we tried to get to a common understanding what we developers and customers especially think when they want to 'improve the intranet'. This led to some discussion which is summed up on the conference page (in German). After that I listened to Manuel Pichler and Sebastian Bergmann who talked about Continuous Integretion with phpUnderControl which was a good introduction to phpUnderControl for me, but I was missing details on the topic in general because I've done my share of work in this field lately - so not much new. After that I attended PHP is not Java, a panel discussion lead by Gaylord Aulke, Johann-Peter Hartmann, Lars Strojny and Stefan Priebsch, that involved more into a discussion with the whole audience, but I think that sparked some even more interesting thoughts. Finally I went to Kore Nordmann who talked about Regular Expressions with the help of Thomas Weinert (who seems to have been bugged about the stalled progress of Weaverslave all the time :P). The talk was more introductory level, but also had some hints towards not-so-well-known features and even recursions and some theory with the proof via Pumping Lemma. Not much new to me, but very interesting nevertheless. And so it ended and after a little sightseeing tour of Hamburg by Markus Wolff, who originally just planned to take us along to the central station.

To sum it up it was a very nice weekend, not only for the talks but especially for the discussions started in the talks and to meet some people I've known from online talk for years in person finally. Big Thank You! to all the people involved, the orga team for a near perfect event, Reinhard for WLAN access, the sponsoring of the yummy food and all the people I've had some nice chat with.