Groeten uit Amsterdam!
The Dutch PHP Conference was organised in Amsterdam on 13th to 14th June. During the two conference days, attendees enjoyed the top-rate organisation and well-prepared, highly skilled speakers.
On Friday the 13th, despite the alarming date, more than a hundred techies had taken their chances and signed up for a tutorial. Topics varied from PHPUnit by Sebastian Bergmann to different frameworks (Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Symfony by Fabien Potencier and Stefan Koopmanschap), all the way to Xdebug and Advanced PHP (delivered by Derik Rethans and Dennis-Jan Broerse, respectively).
Talks from the PHP gurus
After the opening keynote by Zeev Suraski (the ZE in Zend) and Marco Tabini's take on what is important in a given language, the second conference date was delivered into three parallel tracks, in order to cater for a wider range of interests. Attendees could choose from talks on eZ Components, PHP Deployment with Subversion, PHP Security, and PHP 6, just to name some of what was offered. We enjoyed Gaylord Aulke's speech on how delivery teams can organise their work - and look forward to seeing how the methodologies mentioned will work in practice on large and complex projects. The closing keynote was delivered by Terry Chay, who talked about improving social stickiness on his social networking sites - who'd have thought that adding a smiley to an email title would attract 20% more click-throughs!
Ibuildings experiences
Especially for the Ibuildings UK team who are spread around the country, it was as fantastic opportunity to just wander up to someone and find out that we work together, putting faces to names. And it seemed like our black polo shirts were everywhere, talking to each other and of course the community. So far, this year's growth in the UK has been a real joy to witness; we have such great talents at Ibuildings that we should all be proud, and we want to create new areas of expertise. We look forward to this challenge immensely. Also, plans for the DPC 2009 have already begun to take shape - see you next year on 12th-13th June!
