It has been the one I enjoyed more, because I could attend some talks that turned out to be my favourite ones.

The day started with the usual introduction by our Cal Evans, and then followed with a keynote about Digg's history. Then, I had to select which of the parallel sessions to go to. It has not been easy to make a choice, because the talks from the second day were really high quality.

However, I think the ones I picked up were definitely among those that could have been labeled «Warning: highly professional content. Be careful»; the topics were beyond the mere web development with PHP, and they showed once again that the PHP ecosystem can be and actually is serious.

Anyway, the first talk I attended was What are you talking about? Document classification in PHP by Ian Barber. The core topic was Document classification and how to deal with it from PHP applications. Ian did a very good job presenting the problem and discussing the practical solutions; the tradeoff between the academic notions and the practical PHP approach was very well tuned. It resulted in a clear, useful and professional talk that emerged among the others.

Afterwards, I attended PHP Compiler Internals by Sebastian Bergmann. Again, slides and speech were very well organized. It was really interesting, especially to me, because I could see many things I already knew applied to the PHP compiler. Beyond that, to the general audience, I think it was also a good way to stimulate the interest of people in getting involved in PHP core and extension development. In fact, Sebastian presented the topic in a way that made it look as much fun as PHP development. And I bet it is.

Finally, my last talk was Trees in the Database: Advanced Data Structures by Lorenzo Alberton. This is definitely another one which contributed to keep the average quality of the conference very high. Once again, a talk about advanced topics, strictly related to professional applications. It was full of both theoretical and practical information about the different ways you can represent a tree structure and efficiently deal with it with a Relational DBMS.

Well, those three were by far my favourite talks in the conference. In between them, I also attended Building a platform from open source at Yahoo! by Dustin Whittle. It was different compared to the other three, but still a very good tutorial for introducing people to the right way to build web applications using the open source tools provided by Yahoo!

Of course, I do not have the gift of ubiquity, so unfortunately I could attend only those talks. But many people told me very good things about Everything you always wanted to know about UTF-8 (but never dared to ask) by Juliette Reinders Folmer.

To conclude, at the end of that long but very good day, we all attended the closing keynote by Cal and Ivo. While a nice slideshow with the best photos and tweets of the conference was running on the background, Ivo and Cal invited Andrei Zmvieski, Lorna Mitchell and Paul Reinheimer on the stage, asking them different questions (some of them coming straight from the Twittersphere).

During this session, the prizes for the European WinPHP Challenge were assigned too (for the record, the first prize went to Juozas Kaziukėnas with his Gallery X).

Afterwards, we went for drinks with all attendees. So, definitely a good time, both personally and professionally. If you were not here, you missed a lot!