One man’s voice

ZendCon 2008 - Day 3

Posted on September 17th, 2008 in General

Sometimes you can pick them well and sometimes you can’t. That was the story of my day.

After missing the morning session that I wanted to go to (Elizabeth Smith’s talk on Architecting for PHP5 happened to be in the smallest room and was full 10 minutes before the start) Jason and I made our way to the big room where we learned about several lesser known security vulnerabilities in PHP. Stefan Essar has a knack for finding security issues in PHP and moving the fixes into production rapidly (his technique is a little, well, cutting edge but gets the job done with a minimum of carnage).

After Stefan’s talk we attended the “State of Ajax” keynote given by Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian. All I can say about this talk is WOW. I did not know that the web was headed in the direction it is headed and I am so excited to be a web developer right now because what is going to be produced over the next few years is going to be butt-kicking goodness. I am just plain excited and looking forward to tapping into this technology. Plus Ben was using his iPhone as a remote to control his presentation on his Mac, and he showed how to use a Wii with Javascript to make a dart game for your computer.

From there things went a little downhill. Instead of hitting up Terry Chay’s talk about “Making your frameworks suck less” in his uncon session I decided to listen to Chris Shiflett talk about security centered design. I think this was not the wisest choice I could have made. Terry Chay was running the gauntlet on foul language and involving his attendees while Shiflett, as much as I love this dude, just talked about, well, to be honest, I’m not really sure. It lulled me a tad and it was actually more entertaining to watch Terry Chay’s talk on the #zendcon Twitter stream than it was listening to Chris (sorry Chris, I give you mad props for security but the talk was a little boring).

Thinking that I wanted to hit up Andrei Zmievsky’s “VIM for PHP Programmers” talk next we headed up there to find that there were no tables in his class room. This made following in VIM very difficult so instead I changed gears and hit up Sebastian Bergmann’s “Quickstart to Continuous Integration” talk. That, I think, was my first mistake. I totally misunderstood continuous integration I believe since I was not really able to follow along in that talk at all.

It got better though when I went to Eli White’s talk on “High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques”. His talk, while covering some high level ideas and principles, was easy to follow and offered a lot of good information to the listeners. If I ever get to the point where I get to deploy several servers I will be sure to dig up the slides from this talk because it was awesome for those that are interested in scaling applications to a large degree.

After Eli’s talk we headed to dinner where we hung out a bit more with Brad Vernon over beers and snacks. And though I really, really wanted to go to the Yahoo! party, Jason, who was acting as my chauffeur for the evening had to hit the road so we took off and headed home. But the day was not a total loss. I was able to meet Andi Gutmans (the “nd” part of Zend) and Keith Casey. So overall it was an awesome day of learning, networking and meeting people I have really wanted to meet. I cannot almost not wait until tomorrow.