Due to work, I was unfortunately unable to attend the entirety of php|works, opting instead to swan in on Thursday evening just in time for the open bar.
After an aborted attempt at dinner in the hotel restaurant (“Uh, we have 15 minutes before we have to go… it took them twice as long to seat us, I don’t think we’re going to get any food”) we ordered pizza from pizza hut and after it arrived we headed to the 20/20 social event (and of course, the aforementioned open bar).
A tremendous time was had by all, especially Jeff who won an xbox 360. I then spent the rest of the evening polishing up my slides for my talk on Friday.
Lunch came and went too quickly on Friday, with my talk following immediately afterwards; I tried a new approach for this talk, and for a first time it went well. I usually suffer from the common “he-who-reads-from-slides” speaker syndrome, and I hate this, so this time, I put up title slides while I talked about subjects, but I still wrote the full slide for reference after the fact — I hope in this way, the slides can stand on their own a little, while not boring my audience. I will say, that of all the feedback I got, the common theme was “too much code”, and unfortunately, once you get passed the concepts, this is a code-y subject. All in all, I’m happy with my performance and will try similar next time.
Friday night, we had a “surprise” Good Luck dinner for Cal Evans (organized by Johanna Cherry and myself, with some aid from Ben Ramsey) at the “Max Lager brew pub” which was great; there was at least 25 people and much fun was had by [almost] all. I hope this in some way gives Cal a little bit back for the wonderful contributions he made to the community while at Zend, and also illustrated to ibuildings just what a wonderful asset they have. Good Luck in Europe Cal!
Saturday, saw myself, Johanna, Ivo, Helgi headed to a mall in downtown Atlanta (which, frankly, could easily have been anywhere in the US, including my home-town), where I picked up my 7th pair of iPhone headphones (*sigh*) and the first pair of socks since I moved to Florida and switched to flip-flops 4 years ago (booo!). From there we made our way to the Coco-Cola museum, but once we arrived, me and Johanna decided that it was too cold and we wanted to hit the hot tub again, so we left Ivo and Helgi and grabbed a cab to spend some time in the pool with Derick, Sebastian, Stefan and Scott.
Finally, Sunday, after some breakfast with Johanna, I sat down to write this blog post in the lobby — my flight isn’t for (still) another 5hrs.
I had a great time, as always at a php|architect conference, even if this one included Python guys (sorry! I almost made it through the entire post without a jibe).
I really wish I’d had more time to enjoy the conference and maybe take in some of the non-PHP talks, but there’s always next time!
You can download my slides as a Quicktime movie (click to advance the slides, it’s not a “video”), and once slideshare stops sucking, I’ll upload them there. Download (5.5MB)
Pictures can be found on flickr
Update: Slides can now be found on SlideShare
– Davey