php|tek Day 3

The third and final day of the conference finished yesterday, I attended Hartmuts talk on Clustering MySQL; which went great, despite Hartmuts jet-lag – poor guy :-)

Also yesterday, we had the closing Keynote, which unfortunately, due to a family emergency, Marco was unable to give – however, (and I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name!) php|arch’s marketing guy took over, and he did a *great* job :-)

He spoke about the changes he’s seeing in the community (a drive towards open source commercial products), and was very keen to get everybodies thoughts an opinions on php|tek and what they would like to see in the future. He also said that they are trying to maintain a more intimate event, rather than the huge conferences, and are only looking to have 200 people at the next event (php|works and db|works – Toronto Sept. 14-19th I think), and got some suggestions on how to make things more intimate – everything from a meet and greet on the first day to a shot of tequila being given on the way in :-D

Further to that, they gave out one of the excellent php|architect branded pointers to the winner of the Flickr Photo Stream contest and a 30GB Video iPod to one of the media sponsors…. ME :-D

Finally he asked for a show of hands about a location for next years spring conference, there was a good show of hands for Orlando again (mine included) and also for the West Coast somewhere. They also mentioned the possibility of having it outside of the states – who knows, perhaps another cruise or tropics? :-D

I had an excellent time at the conference, but because I was so busy preparing for my own talks, had little time to get to others and socialize. Next time I will be better prepared and far less nervous :-D

I most likely will not be going to the Toronto event, but it is being held at the same hotel as last year and was amazing – if you didn’t get to php|tek, I encourage you to check it out.

To everybody new who I spoke to, it was great meeting you and to everybody who attended my talks, thank you so very much! I would really appreciate any feedback you can give; just e-mail me or use the contact form (linked on right).

I don’t know how long it will take me to post-process my videos, I may just rip out the audio track because the first one is missing several minutes which I would like to fill in (my camera will only record 1GB at a time we found out, thanks to a windows bug – ack).

I’m going to upload more photos to my Flickr stream now, including the PHP ice sculpture :-D

– Davey