Jun
16
This saturday saw the second edition of the Dutch PHP Conference. Organized by iBuildings and Zend, and with a number of big names from the PHP community in the line-up, the program looked promising. With 4 separate tracks on friday’s tutorial day and 3 tracks on conference day it was impossible to attend everything, so I’ll just go over some of the highlights.
Ivo Jansch of iBuildings kicked off the conference by throwing 20 elePHPants into the crowd (of course, I sat at the back and Ivo will never make it as a Major League pitcher, so fat chance there). The fluffy blue mascots were “generously” donated by co-sponsor Oracle. Apparently for more than 20 you need to get an enterprise license first, and hire a certified Oracle DBA to do the throwing.
Zeev Suraski, one of the creators of PHP as we know it today and co-founder of Zend gave the opening keynote, an overview of the origins of PHP and the challenges PHP faces in the future. Unfortunately he felt the need to include the obligatory snide remarks about Ruby on Rails and Twitter.
Next up was Marco Tabini, who’s talk entitled “Software and the taste of mayo” turned out the be the highlight of the day. In a funny, engaging and insightful talk Tabini even managed to slip in some jabs at Ruby that where actually funny. Of course it helps if the speaker displays a keen insight into the subject matter instead of just taking cheap shots. His talk was extremely enlightening, looking at developing websites in terms of “Profit Density” (as in profit per page) and ways of using cloud computing services like Amazon’s to create the perfect balance between costs and scalability.
After that the conference was split in to three different tracks, and this is where the main weakness of the program became clear: a lot of the talks partially covered the same subject matter like version control, unit testing, continuous integration, packaging and deployment, in short: professional, “enterprisey” software development in PHP. Besides that, the speakers covered the material largely from the same angle, with almost identical tools and strategies, and mostly preaching to the already converted. The latter is in itself of course good news, compared to the situation some years ago.
However all of the talks were all quite good, and well worth the relatively low pricetag. But some more variation and maybe even some dissenting voices would have been welcome. With some exceptions (I was told the session on PHP security was very interesting), there was a bit too much of the mutual admiration society going on here.
The closing speaker of the conference, the highly anticipated Terry “the PHP Terrorist” Chay was very entertaining and despite the warning labels his “The Internet Is An Ogre” talk was not particularly offensive (at least not to a mostly Dutch audience). Albeit somewhat incoherent and rambling at times, making it seem more like a “best of Terry Chay” compilation than actually getting to a point, he did manage impart a lot of useful information.
Some of which was implemented on the spot by Folke Lemaitre of Netlog (if you see smileys appear on the subject line of your Netlog invites, that’s where it comes from). And of course Chay mercilessly dissed Ruby. What the f*** did you expect?
All in all it was a lovely, entertaining and educational day out of the coding dungeon for us PHP geeks, thanks to the iBuildings crew for putting this all together!
Some random observations
- Lorna Jane should start selling Nabaztags after her talk. Seriously, she could have sold at least 5 or 6 right there. Using the WiFi rabbits as ambient alerts is an awesome idea.
- Catering at the RAI conference center isn’t great, but the summit of suckyness was formed by the lukewarm brownish water that was quite mistakenly referred to as “coffee”.
- Dissing Ruby on Rails is a sign of weakness if at the same time we fail to address the reasons why RoR has captured the imagination of a generation of developers that has come up with some of the most awesome new web 2.0 applications. This not a coincidence. RoR may not be the answer, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the question. Besides that, it’s just getting old.
- We need more elePHPants! Seriously. These kind of “social objects” ( (c) Hugh Macleod) are at least as important in promoting PHP as rational arguments…
Some quotes
Lorna Jane Mitchell: “I think I might be the world’s most ditzy developer”
Gaylord Aulke: “Java and J2EE, I love it!” (on his slides)
Sebastian Bergmann: “I blame it on my brain not working proberly at this time”
Terry Chay: (every other sentence)
For pics, search Flickr for ‘dpc08′, and check out Summize for what was said on Twitter.
Comments
6 Responses to “Dutch PHP Conference 2008: elePHPants, mayo, ogres and rabbits”
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Nice bitz
Hi Rick!
I’m interested, what kind of dissenting voices would you’ve liked to hear?
Greetings,
Boy
@Boy: People critical of the PHP5 upgrade path and release policy, hosting providers that have to deal new PHP versions breaking old sites, people critical of PHP’s OOP implementation or PHP’s security policies, people critical about ZF’s integration with Dojo, that kind of thing. And of course, the jury is still out on PHP being ready for the “Enterprise” (the business type, not the starship). There’s been plenty of discussion online about these things.
And maybe not dissenting but different voices, like Microsoft (wtf do they want with PHP?), and as we seem to be so pre-occupied with Ruby, why not ask one of the many PHP to Ruby switchers?
One thing I found worrying that so very few attending developers ever used anything other than PHP. That combined with prejudices being propagated from the stage doesn’t make for better PHP developers, quite the contrary. I think a conference is way better if it also challenges peoples ideas and preconceptions instead of just confirming them.
Did someone say Terry Chay?!
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I have a feeling I am going to be stuck with that quote as my tagline on a medium to long term basis
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