The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.
What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!
To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at:
PHP Tek
Located in Chicago, as it has for the previous years, it was a great conference as always. A very good community presence at the conference, which makes it very enjoyable to attend, both to see quality talks given by some of the best PHP speakers in the world and meet old friends and make some new, the best MTA conference so far.
I gave a whole day tutorial on caching and performance with Scott MacVicar and then gave a talk on frontend caching. Both went over fantastically, a lot of user interaction, my talk was full and the tutorial great fun with loads of people in it.
No doubt the best PHP conference in the states at the moment, a must go to for anyone living close (or even afar)
Tutorial slides
http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/caching-for-cash-part-1
http://www.slideshare.net/smacvicar/caching-for-cash-benchmarking-and-profiling
http://www.slideshare.net/smacvicar/caching-for-cash-caching
http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/caching-for-cash-part-4
Talk slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/coping-with-cyber-monday
Dutch PHP Conference (DPC)
As before DPC was held by Ibuildings in the RAI in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. DPC seems growing every year I see it and was not suffering from any recession problems this year like many events have, if anything they made things even grander than before.
DPC is to Europe what PHP Tek is to the States, a world class conference with high quality speakers and talks, without losing sight of the community. It’s one of those conferences where I expect I will go every year for unforeseen time and try to drag along as many friends as possible, great fun!
I gave my Caching for Cash tutorial with Scott MacVicar, where we sold out and the room was so full that people had to stand around or sit on desks way back in the room, we even brought in couple of extra seats.
The tutorial went over very well, our best performance so far! (pun intended)
The slides can be seen at
http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/cashing-for-cash-part-1-dpc-2009
http://www.slideshare.net/smacvicar/caching-for-cash-benchmarking-and-profiling
http://www.slideshare.net/smacvicar/caching-for-cash-caching
http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/caching-for-cash-part-4-dpc-2009
OSCON
This was the first time I go to OSCON so all I have to compare it against are the stories I hear from other people, but there was a problem with basing my expectations on those stories and that was due to the fact OSCON moved from Portland to San Jose, a move a lot of people were not happy with.
I had high hopes but going in I must admit I didn’t really feel the “awesomeness” that a lot of people had been talking about, while a good conference with amazing speakers and good expo, it seemed like a shadow of it’s former self. It was the first year they had a decline in attandence, 500 less or so, no doubt due to location change.
This being one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, there were very good talks in there, ranging from design to programming to hardwares, it is not to be shuned even tho it changed location and has a higher than average entrance fee. You will always get value for you money and meet great people.
As for what I saw at the conference, I poked my head into random talks about various topics but the one that sits best in my mind is the one Jon Tan gave on “Grokkin Design”, great material but due to the fact that OSCON only has 45 minute talks (which I do not understand) he could only touch lightly on the subject.
I gave my “Website releases made easy with the PEAR installer”, it went over nicely but suffered from the whole 45 minutes talk problem, where I originally designed this talk to be at least an hour.
Furhter info on my talk can be found at http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8126 and the slide can be gotten from here http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/website-releases-made-easy-with-the-pear-installer-oscon-2009
I would like to thank Chris, Sean and Jon for allowing me to crash with them and Andrei for being a fantastic host and taking us all over the place for great food and drinks, it really added that extra spark to a good trip 🙂
Upcoming:
I will also be presenting soon at ZendCon (http://www.zendcon.com) where I will talk about frontend caching and Epicenter in Dublin (http://www.epicenter.ie) where I will talk about frontend caching and how to deploy your websites with the PEAR installer.
And hopefully couple of other conferences around the world.
See you there!
