Dutch PHP Conference 2011 in retrospect
Last Dutch PHP Conference (DPC11) was great! It was the first time I visited, but it has been a great experience.
Due to a small problem with one of my projects, I had to pass by at the office friday first, but was able to round it all up and still attend the last 3 talks of the day. Besides the very interesting topics, I was also able to talk to friends, colleagues and other acquaintances again.
The talks I had the pleasure to attend:
Simplify your external dependency management by Stephan Hochdoefer
http://joind.in/talk/view/3232
This was the first talk I enjoyed and had very high hopes about it, as this is an issue I commonly face with PHP applications. It is often a relieve to work with Maven if I do a java project (until you meet the disadvantages of maven). Unfortunately, Stephan failed to give me a breaking new insight in external dependency management, but still had some good pointers and I think I will be taking some tips from him to cook up my own dependency management environment.
Clean PHP by Sebastian Bergmann
http://joind.in/talk/view/3235
This was another highly anticipated talk, due to the reputation Sebastian enjoys in the community and the many talks he has given so far. Unfortunately, it was not as good as expected. Sebastian mostly read aloud from his laptop and the covered topics where very beginner-level.
Advanced OO Patterns by Tobias Schlitt
http://joind.in/talk/view/3240
Tobias is a guy who loves beer jokes and hand raising in his talks. This, combined with the advanced topic (which I liked), made it a very enjoyable last topic of the day. And nobody fell asleep!
The next day, we were introduced to the day by
First class APIs by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
http://joind.in/talk/view/3241
Helgi gave a very clear keynote about APIs and why they should be first class citizens. Got it, memorized it, although the talk was a bit repetitive at the end.
Profiling PHP Applications by Dereck Rethans
http://joind.in/talk/view/3242
Dereck gave an excellent, in-depth, talk about how to profile PHP applications. And not just with XDebug, the tool he wrote, but also with general available tools such as ApacheBench, siege, vmstat, dstat, inclued, XHProf (and XHGui) and KCacheGrind. Very informative, very interesting and definitely one of the talks I learned the most from.
Managing a shared MySQL farm by Thijs Ferijn
http://joind.in/talk/view/3247
Although Thijs is an excellent speaker, my expectations of this presentation differed from the actual talk. This lead to me browsing twitter a lot. The topic was interesting enough... if you are a hosting provider and struggle with the same problems Combell is struggling with.
Modular application architecture By Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann
http://joind.in/talk/view/3249
The first and only talk which was done by two people. A daring move, but it proved to be possible and enjoyable. Tobias and Kore complement each other perfectly and gave a great talk about various ways to setup a modular application architecture. The beauty of the talk were the pros and cons of each approach. This highlighted the fact that there is no silver bullet, there is no holy grail and that the architect should think about the taken approach and the consequences it leads to.
Practical Git by David Soria Parra
http://joind.in/talk/view/3251
This was a very in-depth, highly advanced talk about some of the more advanced features of Git. It was a great talk, with lots of demos and clear explanations of what-the-hell-was-going-on. Two funny mentions:
1. David wore a t-shirt saying "Mercurial Developer" while giving this talk.
2. At the beginning of the presentation, David asked the audience: "Who here is familiar with Git?", to which only some people raised their hands. David's reply: "Oh shit..."
The day was closed with a keynote by Cal Evans (Open teams http://joind.in/talk/view/3254). Cal is a great speaker with lots of experience in the field and the keynote was very enjoyable. Too bad none of my managers were there to listen to him, as that would have probably made the best impression.
At the end, I enjoyed a beer and had the time to congratulate @mvriel with winning a slot at DPC12 with his uncon talk about DocBlox (https://github.com/mvriel/Docblox)
All in all, it was a great weekend, packed full with exciting stuff to take a look at in the coming weeks. Oh, and I won an elephpant!

