One man’s voice

ZendCon 2008 - Day 4

Posted on September 18th, 2008 in PHP, Personal Messages

Today was the fourth and final day of the Zend Conference in Santa Clara and I am almost sad (actually I am sad) that the conference is over. This has been one of the best experiences of my life and certainly of professional career as I was able to meet several of my peers that I have looked up to for quite a while.

But before we get into all that there were a few things that I was able to take away from today that I thought were interesting. Much of this came from the panel discussion on what is to be expected in PHP 5.3 and some of the things PHP has planned for Windows development. The discussion was pretty high level but it entailed some things that a lot of developers are going to love like namespaces, late static binding, variable class name allowance in static method calls and the __DIR constant that will expose itself as the current directory from which your code is being called.

After the morning, as I was walking upstairs I ran into Davey Shafik. We talked for a bit and were soon joined by a collection of people that, to me, represent a sort of pantheon of PHP names:

• Davey Shafik
• Stefan Priebsch
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Derick Rethans
• Paul Reinheimer
• Keith Casey
• Ed Finkler
• Christian Flickinger
• Ben Ramsey
• Rafael Dohms
• Laura Thomson

I was fortunate enough to actually meet Paul and Laura for the first time. The other folks I had met throughout the conference and thoroughly enjoyed their company this morning. After what seemed an entirely too short an hour or so I decided it was time to call it a conference and proceeded home, somewhat sad that this great experience was over and somewhat relieved at that same thought.

I am so looking forward to next year’s Zend Conference. Perhaps I might make it to a few other conferences before then (like Tek or Works). If not, I will still be happy in knowing that I was finally able to mix it up a bit with my peers and I was able to get my ZCE certification. I am so stoked now.