First of all, it is always nice to visit a city in another country, especially a world famous city like London. Even if it is just for a one night stay. Furthermore, the PHP Conference was a well chosen event to promote our Ibuildings UK office, which was founded last year. Today we can provide all kinds of PHP and Zend related services for the UK market as we have done for several years now in The Netherlands.
On top of it all (besides attending several presentations of different interesting PHP subjects, which I will get to in a minute), I got to meet my English colleagues! They welcomed us to the conference, slapped a bright red Ibuildings/Zend t-shirt on us and made us feel part of the team right from the start. They truly are excellent representatives of the Ibuildings 'spirit'. For those who are wondering what I mean: feel free to drop by and check it out yourself .

It all started very early on Februari 29th, about 04:30 hours GMT+1 (which by the way proved to have a significant influence on my attention span in the late afternoon). I drove to the airport, hopped on a plane from Rotterdam Airport to London Stansted, took a train to Liverpool Street and walked to the venue to arrive at 09:00 GMT. Right on time.

First up was Ivo Jansch, our CTO. He opened the conference with a very entertaining and informative presentation about all kinds of aspects that can make or break a PHP project. Especially his metaphores caused quite some laughter from the audience. He's writing a book about it, you can read all about it here if you like.
From this point on there were to 'tracks' to follow: talks on general topics in the main room and more specialized talks in a smaller room, which meant that only about 75 of the 300 people could follow these talks at the same time. Next up were Scott MacVicar & Mike Sullivan (Lessons Learned: Experience from the front line) and Stefan Esser (PHP Binary Analysis). I decided to go see Stefan Esser. At first I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it turned out to be an interesting aspect of PHP to analyse compiled code for potentially harmful code injections you can cause by using the 'eval' language construct (a.k.a. 'evil'). I found out that some guy actually FIRES people for using 'eval'... I thought that was pretty cool.
After lunch, it was time for Marcus Bointon (Mail(); & Life after Mail();) and Scott MacVicar (SQLite 3) to talk. I decided to stay on the 'specialist' track and went to see Scott. I never worked with SQLite and that was my main reason to check it out. I never knew it was so widely used in so many areas, especially where a relatively large RDBMS is not required or desired. For me, it was quite the eye opener.
After that, a few people got to talk: Rob Allen, Toby Beresford & Ian P. Christian (My Framework is better than yours?) or Zoe Slattery (Testing PHP, Test || Die), who shared her timeslot with Anthony Phillips (Project Zero). Getting two talks for the time of one, I stayed on track 2 and listened to Zoe and Anthony. Testing PHP itself turned out to be not as easy as it may seem. Statistics showed that many, many more testcases need to be written to get a decent improvement in code coverage, which doesn't even mean that the quality of the tests will improve equally, but it is obvious that it is simply something that really needs to be done to make sure that bugfixes and new features won't break the existing functionality. Anthony Phillips then showed us what Project Zero is all about: "an agile development and execution environment which leverages REST and scripting runtimes to speed and simplify development and deployment of dynamic Web applications." Sorry to quote from ProjectZero.org, but I couldn't put it better myself. Anthony also prepared a nice monitoring demo for us in which he showed us how little it takes to produce a nice little app in a Project Zero environment.
The 'closing keynote' was performed by Derick Rethans, who talked us through the history of PHP development and also promoted test-driven development for the future. A very informative and entertaining presentation I might add. And Derick, if you're reading this, thanks for the photo...

Five o'clock: Time for some drinks in the lobby. There was a strong rumour going around that one of the sponsors of the event, Allegis I think, decided to sponsor another 2500 pounds on beer. It became a fun afterparty real fast... After a couple of longnecks, people got hungry. Expecting something typically British like a pub or a curry restaurant, we ended up in a place called The Bavarian Beer House... go figure. At least it was authentic: the serving girls were real nice German girls in German dresses serving German beer and German food in a German style cellar. After a tasty Wiener schnitzel and gulping down the largest glass of beer I ever had (1L) it was time to go to the hotel. At that time I was awake for about 20 hours and had quite some beer so falling asleep was no problem at all.

Saturday and time to go home. When I, Marc and Ivo got together for breakfast at the LiverPool Street station, I noticed my wallet was missing. Luckily it was not stolen but I left it at the desk of the hotel where I picked it up again. After a nice breakfast at Ponti's I had to get to Stansted airport to fly back to Rotterdam. Security was very tight: my first name in my passport (which expired in 10 days) didn't match the name on the ticket, I was not allowed one small backpack and a laptop case as hand baggage, had to take off my shoes, and on op of it all: I got a seat on row 13 and had to wait for the delayed airplane. It seemed like the Saturday misery was compensating the Friday fun...

That's it. Thanks to Marc and Derick for supplying the photos in this post and I'll hopefully see you at the Dutch PHP Conference!