Eli White from Zend gave a great talk about scalability, including some approaches for scaling up databases in particular that I hadn't seen before. Also on the database theme Ligaya Turmelle from MySQL gave a very thorough overview of ways to tune MySQL servers, and Maggie Nelson from Schematic gave a talk about PHP and ORM.

With the release of PHP 5.3 imminent, it was good to see some talks about the new version and its features. Sara Golemon (Yahoo!) and Elizabeth Smith (OmniTI) both gave really informative talks on this topic - with Sara covering the new features and Elizabeth giving us insight into SPL, the Standard PHP Library. Although SPL isn't strictly speaking new in 5.3 (it was new in 5.2), it isn't widely used at the moment and gets a lot of great new features in the upcoming version.

Two talks which stood out for me weren't, strictly speaking, technical. They both talked about different aspects of "the bigger picture"; managing projects and people within the PHP development process. Paul M Jones from OmniTI and Wez Furlong from Message Systems both delivered excellent sessions and inclusion of these types of topics at conferences reminds me that PHP is growing up!

I also had sessions to deliver in my own right as a speaker. On tutorial day I co-presented a half-day session entitled "Practical SVN for PHP Developers" alongside Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Project Lead for Zend Framework. The less time-pressured pace of a tutorial allowed us to answer questions and illustrate our point with demonstrations. During the main conference I delivered a session entitled "Linux-Fu for PHP Developers" - a session where I showed usage of some of the command-line tools I use often on a Linux platform. "Using and Understanding the Community" was a session which I co-presented with my friend and Ibuildings colleague Stefan Koopmanschap. This was a round-up of our combined community experiences, telling our audience about what the community looks like and how to get involved. This session was so popular we had to deliver it again in the unconference the following day so that those who missed it the first time could attend.

Ibuildings was well-represented right across the conference since in addition to my own sessions, Stefan spoke on refactoring, and our colleague Cal Evans delivered sessions on telecommuting and on using the Zend Framework from the command line - quite a selection of sessions between us and a great opportunity to get together with the other leading lights in the industry.