This past weekend I attended CodeWorks 2009 in Dallas, TX and it was great. I got to meet some notable people in the PHP community and hear some interesting topics. I thought it would be good to share the high points of the experience.
Day one was a tutorial day. I started the day with a presentation by Sebastian Bergmann, Arne Blankerts and Stefan Priebsch of thePHP.cc. They shared the results of code reviews for a variety of open source projects to demonstrate best practices and bad coding habits or choices to avoid. It was fun and the audience was engaged in the discussion. That afternoon I attended Stefan’s presentation on Advanced OOP and Design Patterns and I enjoyed it very much. Since I had to choose I missed Jason Sweat’s presentation on Test Driven Design featuring SimpleTest. I did get the chance to talk to Jason and he was great. He helped me make a tough choice between sessions and the next time he’s presenting at a conference that I attend I will make it a point to catch his talk.
That night I had the opportunity to have dinner with thePHP.cc guys. It was great to get to know them better and hear about their experiences as PHP consultants, authors and presenters. Many thanks to Arne for being my navigator and making sure we didn’t get lost in downtown Fort Worth, TX! If you need help with QA or best practices around PHP you should definitely give these guys a call.
The next day there were some great if more compact presentations. Cal Evans and his “Five Things I Wish They’d Told Me” speech was great fun. Cal is an entertaining speaker and very engaging. Scott MacVicar’s talk on “Alternative Databases” was interesting and got me experimenting with a MapReduce based DB. Derick Rethans’ “Debugging with xDebug” was particularly helpful given he’s the author of the tool. Travis Swicegood presented Micro-Frameworks in PHP which was interesting since I have been researching PHP Micro Frameworks. Brian Blood, a local presenter, did a good job of highlighting the challenges that PHP programmers face when handling high volume e-mail in “Full Cycle Email Management”. I missed Chris Cornutt’s “B.S.T., Easy as 1 2 3”, but I hope to catch him the next time he speaks.
I had a long drive home so I had to leave early and I missed Ben Ramsey’s “The Hidden Gems of HTTP” and Cal Evans’ “Design Patterns in PHP”, but I can tell you I was looking forward to both. I’ll be checking their blogs after the tour to read through their slide decks and ask tons of questions.
All in all I had a great time and met some great folks. If you ever have the chance to attend a PHP or open source conference in your neck of the woods I highly recommend the experience.
