The fun part about the whole OSCON interview series was that almost one half of the interviews I did worked at OmniTI. Here's is my interview with Wez Furlong. As with others from OmniTI, Wez Furlong proved to be a fascinating subject to talk to.

They talk some about Wez's psat and how he got into PHP, what he's mainly working on now in the PHP core, some about streams and SQLite, Unicode in PHP6, and other questions.

He also finds out Wez's answer to a question he asks all of his interviewees - what technology are they looking forward to the most for the future. Of course, you'll need to read the interview to get that and the rest of the answers from this chat with Wez Furlong.

I had nothing on Jeremy, all I knew was that he was speaking at OSCON and he worked at Yahoo. As it turns out, it was a very interesting interview. Not for the normal reasons though. If you want more, you'll have to come inside and read the interview.

Well, I'll cheat a bit and tell you some of the topics they talked about such as:

• Jeremey's experience and background
• his experience at Yahoo!
• some of the work he's done there (including the Address Book application)
• Yahoo!'s move to PHP 5
• everyone's favorite topic - "disaster recovery"

This is another entry in the series of interviews I did at OSCON 2006. This time, I was privileged to sit down with Andrei Zmievski and talk about Unicode, Yahoo and other PHP topics. Andrei is a native of Uzbekistan and came to the US to study when he was 16 years old. He now works at Yahoo on their Infrastructure team and is pursuing a Master's degree in Linguistics.

They talk about Unicode for PHP6 (Andrei's big push), the status and some specifics of the project, his work wth Yahoo!, a look towards the future of PHP, and some of Andrei's personal background - including how he came to the PHP community.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

At OSCON 2006, I caught up with most of the principals of OmniTI. They each gave me some time out of their busy schedule to ask them about their history, the company, PHP and technology in general. One of the OmniTI gang I got to talk with was George Schlossnagle.

I was able to pry George away from speaking and taking pictures long enough to sit down and talk tech for a few minutes. Here's how our conversation went.

They talked about how George got started, both with PHP and at OmniTI, some about the company, and what kind of work he does there. They get into more PHP-type things when they talk about scalability, session management, PHP mistakes, updates and its use in the enterprise. Oh, and of course, the fun questions...

The slides [pdf] summarizes his talk, described as:

PHP 5's ext/SOAP extension is an excellent web services client. However, while the easy things are easy, lack of documentation means the hard things can appear downright impossible. Starting with SOAPClient basics and building upwards, learn the hidden secrets necessary to conquer even the strangest WSDL.

In the presentation, he not only describes the functionality the PHP 5 extension offers, but provides a few simple code examples to help with the explaination.

Adam is the senior manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay. His job is to communicate to developers all the cool things possible with eBay's web services. We sat for a half-hour to discuss PHP, eBay, where things are and where they are going. Here's what he had to say.

They talk about how Adam got into both PHP and made his way to eBay, a glimpse into the eBay web services API, some talk about Adam's book, and what he sees for the future of PHP and its community.

And, of course, what would an interview be without a "fun" question - Cal asks Adam about his favorite technology right now, but you'll have to check out the interview for the answer to that question.

OSCON is a busy conference. I met some sharp minds. I missed catching up with others. In my spare time, I'm testing the PHP 5.2 Windows installer that John Mertic is writing. At the moment John is working hard on getting the installer neat and reliable.

He notes that testing applications, once something a bit more buried in the development process, had three different mentions at this year's conference, at the PHP Lightning Talks.

I didn't attend Theo's talk, so the only information that I got was from the blog entries and slides. I realize that this short presentation was humorous, but it still brings up some points that have been nagging at the back of my head for a while now.

The comment in question is part of the Six Reasons PHP Sucks lightning talk.

The comment jokes about the quality of PEAR code. OF course, as Aaron notes, these types of comments aren't anythng new. The real issue at stake is that people don't understand PEAR. To help further the cause behind this (in)famous set of libraries, he's written an article for php|architect to dispell some of the myths.