For the upcoming 2008 South by Southwest, EllisLab has several exciting events planned; including an open panel discussion, a brunch event... and heck, let's just cut to it, the Party at the Moonshine Grill! (This WILL be the highlight of the conference for you - promise).

You can get more on the conference from its website and more about the EllisLab group from their homepage.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.

I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.

Included in the things he mentions are:

• The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann)
• The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing")
• His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone
• The PHP 5 Certification
• and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk

If you have never been to a PHP Conference, you owe it to yourself to make 2006 a year to attend one. There are of course the obvious benefits of attending the presentations and being able to see these presentations first hand as well as being able to interact with the presenters, ask questions, etc.

A more subtle benefit is the networking which happens at these conferences. People whom you recognize from email addresses on mailing lists, pseudonyms on forums or names on the covers of PHP books are actually living breathing people (and usually fine, upstanding people at that). PHP conferences are a great opportunity to interact with both the presenters, conference organizers and the other attendees, who likely share many common interests with you, chiefly a passion for PHP and web development.

He talks about two conferences that are coming up pretty soon, one on either side of the world. In the U.S., there's php|tek put on by phparch.com, and over in the UK, there's the new PHP UK 2006 conference being held in London...]]> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:03:25 -0600