This is my thoughts about the PHP Conference UK 2010. It was my first conference so maybe my expectations was a bit high.
First the venue, was awesome. Business Design Centre is awesome and the people there was nice and kind (Maybe thats just the nature of the british?). The venue was located in Islington and easy to find. Me and my colleague walked from our hotel at Kings Cross and it only took about 15 minutes to get there.The Registration for the event was painless even though the registration started 30 minutes too late which had some impact on the schedule at the Event, since the first break was 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.The TalksKeynote
The first talk we attended was the keynote titled “The lost art of Simplicity” by Josh Holmes. And i must say it was very inspiring and Josh Holmes did a very good job at involving the whole audience even at 9:30 am in the morning. It also helped he used art from a Danish artist. But overall it gave some stuff to think about and i hope i can incorporate some of what he said in to my daily work.
The next talk we saw was AntiPHPatterns by Stefan Priebsch which was more a presentation than a talk. He took various open source projects including Symfony (my favorite) and ranted about some design decisions. Overall a good talk, even though a some point he mentioned the upcoming “symfony 1.5” which doesn’t exists and there wont be a 1.5 release.PHP 5.3 in practice
This talk i had some high expectations and certainly too high. Since the release of 5.3 i have followed some of the development and the new features. Fabien did a good job but the content just wasn’t for me.PHPillow & CouchDB & PHP
This was the first talk were i was seriously bored. As this is a PHP conference i would have assumed there was some content about PHP in this talk also judged by the title. Kore Nordmann certainly knew what he talked about but the PHP aspect of the talk was missing.Web and mobile application monetisation models
I don’t know what you people assume from the title of this talk but i thought it would be about how we a programmers could leverage the mobile web. Maybe by checking the agent headers and coding for the mobile and in that way turn it into revenue. But under this title was a hidden agenda from PayPal about doing an hour long advertisement for their new X api/platform. And i’m sorry to say bad practice coding examples from the presenter. Best practices in web service design
For this talk i didn’t know what to expect and guess i thought it wouldn’t be for me. But Lorna Mitchell did a great job explaining REST, SOAP and various other solutions. And was a bit of a rant but didn’t bother me. Great presentation.
