Warning: Tomorrow's Blog Entry will be Delayed ...

I'm heads down on a project and won't be online really until Tuesday night.  So your blogging goodness will be delayed (unfortunately).  Sorry about that.

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PHPCon 2002 Report

Wow.  That and "Outstanding" are pretty much my comments on PHP Con 2002.  Not only did they put on a great conference, everyone learned something (and I mean everyone), there were great networking opportunities.  Here are some highlights:

• Rasmus.  Rasmus Lerdorf is the inventor of PHP and he gave my two favorite talks of the conference -- the Keynote and PHP Tips and Tricks.   No I don't remember the URLs (but I'll find them and post them later; if you have them email them to me).
• Rasmus is a) an employee of Yahoo now and b) a hugely nice, smart guy c) an advocate for practicality in software engineering and incremental development.  It's really astonishing when you meet someone who's created something as powerful and widespread as php and find that he's just the nicest guy and so down to earth. 
• Dirk from RackSpace gave a great closing keynote who how Rackspace uses PHP.  I hadn't realized that Rackspace is also one of the bandwidth sponsors for PHP.Net.  Thanks Rackspace!.
• I gave two talks -- Software Engineering Practices for Large Scale PHP Projects [PPT] [HTML] and PHP Login Security [PPT] [HTML].  What was very surprising to me was the large number of people for my engineering presentation, I got moved to the main keynote room when we overflowed into the hall.  And everyone stayed.  Go figure.  I think I had as many people (or a few less) as Rasmus' or Dirk's keynote.  Utterly astonishing to me and I have to thank again everyone who helped make my presentation great.  Thanks!  My login presentation was correctly less well attended since it was too basic for this audience but the people that stayed seemed to enjoy it.  (And, no, not everyone left although I did let people know at the beginning that it was an entry level presentation).
  Note -- Neither of these HTML presentations look very good in Mozilla so I'll try and get the time to convert them to another approach but it'll take a few days.  Sorry ....
• Shelley Johnson of Sams Publishing did a great job and I'll mention more on that later today.  I do think I'll be buying fewer O'Reilly books in the future and more Sams books.  Recommended.
• Michael Radwin gave a great talk on why Yahoo's converting to PHP and the process they went thru to choose it over JSP, J2EE, Perl and other options. [ Go ]
• PHP is now available on 26% of all Internet domains.  26% !!!.   This is according to the Netcraft survey.
• Alex Black gave an interesting talk on Binary Cloud which looks like a very powerful application framework for programming in PHP.
• Aaron Stone gave a good BOF talk on Twig, a PHP groupware application with a strong following in education.
• Tom Clarke of Union Street Internet Development gave an excellent talk on moving an application, Sesame Street, out of Vignette StoryServer / Oracle and into a custom PHP Postgres application.
• I missed Jeremy Zawodny's talk which is too bad since people in the halls said excellent things about it.  Again I don't have the url for it.

And, of course, there were lots and lots of other great presentations [Go].  These are only some of the ones I had time to see.  If anyone wants to email me urls that they know for Phpcon presentations I'll post them and I know that the conference page is trying to aggregate them as well.  Stay tuned.

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