If you weren't able to make it to this year's php|tek conference in Chicago, Michaelangelo van Dam has posted a great wrapup of the event and some of the things that happened during the week.

If you were last week in Chicago, you've might felt the city was buzzing PHP all over the place. php[tek] 2013 was taking place at the Sheraton Gateway Suites Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont, just outside of Chicago city. This year it was also the first time Musketeers.me, a php consulting team from the East Coast, was running the show, putting their own signature onto the event. And with great success I might add. A well deserved applause to Eli White, Kevin Bruce, Sandy Smith, Oscar Merida and of course the Beth Tucker Long for their unlocked achievement running a great conference.

He talks about running the unconference for this year's event and one talk that resonated with a lot of people at the conference, Ed Finkler's "Open Sourcing Mental Illness". He also goes through some of the other regular sessions talks he found interesting covering things like security, refactoring, and dealing with distractions during work. He also mentions the hackathon and some of the good work that was done there.

In my experience the best php[tek] ever, and I'm really looking forward to the 2014 edition. If you don't believe me, have a look at the pictures taken at php[tek] 2013. They will tell the story.

On 7PHP.com today there's a new post spotlighting two upcoming "sister" conferences happening early next month in Amsterdam - the Dutch PHP and Dutch Mobile Conferences. He asked the organizers a few questions about the event like:

• What the conference(s) are about
• When it was first launched and where its been held
• Average and highest number of attendees
• Working with sponsors
• Speaker submission and selection
• How it compares to other conferences
• The differences between running a user group and conference

There's also a mention at the end of the unconference that happens parallel to the event - an open area where people can present on the topic of their choosing. This year's unconfernece chair for DPC/DMC is Jeroen van Dyke.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post about the Symfony Live Portland schedule being published:

We have finally selected all the great speakers that will share their experience with the Framework with you at Symfony Live Portland 2013. We had a very hard time choosing among all the excellent talks' proposals we received. After a long time of thinking, we are very pleased to publish the talks we think you most want to attend for this edition. For the first time in the USA, there will be 2 tracks per day; more than 20 talks are scheduled, a lightning talk session and the now famous Jeopardy session with the fantastic Jeremy Mikola! Let's say that it will be now your turn to have a hard time choosing among these great talks! Have a look now at the schedule and register to the conference!

They also mention the availability of the Symfony certification and that they're still looking for sponsors for this year's event. You can register now and pick up tickets for about $400 USD ($600 for the Combo pass).

Brian Deshong has a new post to his site sharing some of the content (videos) from his upcoming CoderFaire Atlanta (April 20th) talk about web application performance that he's learned over his years in development.

Back in March, I gave a new talk at Atlanta PHP: "Top Ten List: PHP and Web Application Performance". This talk is a culmination of my ~14 years of experience primarily as a web application developer, but also as a systems administrator / DevOps-type. After working with PHP and web applications for so many years, I have amassed quite a few tricks for squeezing maximum performance out of web applications, PHP or otherwise.

The tips are presented by various people from around the web development (and PHP) community and relate to things like:

• Realpath cache settings
• Using offline processing
• Optimized queries
• Gzipping responses
• Caching everything
• Using a content delivery network

If you'd like to see Brian present the full talk, there's still time to get your ticket for CoderFaire - they're only $50 USD for the two day event.

in this new post to his site, Bradley Holt - an organizer of the Northeast PHP Conference - looks at one of the difficult struggles for events right now...getting more women to submit to speak at conferences.

We opened up the call for papers for the Northeast PHP Conference about a week ago. Guessing by the names, it appears that we have a very low number of women who have submitted talks.

He includes some quotes from this post by Courtney Stanton about how she was able to get such a high female submission rate for her event. The basic idea was to offer "consulting" services on their ideas and drafts of presentations to help encourage and bolster their confidence in the event. Bradley is offering to do the same for this year's conference, for anyone - not just women.

The Northeast PHP Conference is being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts August 16th through 18th

The folks behind the Web & PHP Magazine have announced a new event they'll be putting on in San Jose, California in September of this year - the Web & PHP Conference. It's a four day conference featuring sessions, keynotes, an expo and "open knowledge sharing".

Web & PHP Magazine invites you to its first ever conference. This four-day event in September will immerse you in a world of continuously changing and evolving web technologies. Developers will get together and trade great ideas at Web & PHP Con. Whether your interests lay in core PHP, security, testing, architecture, frameworks or cloud, this is the place for you. Maybe HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, UX, mobile web or web-based mobile apps are where it's at for you. That's okay - we'll have loads. And if Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery or strategies are in your presentation bucket list, you won't be disappointed. Come and hear about latest technologies and methods, discuss your own project developments and find new solutions.

They've also opened their call for papers so you can submit your own ideas to present. There's a wide range of themes they're looking for at the event including things like:

• Core PHP
• Testing & Quality
• HTML5 & CSS3
• Mobile Web, Responsive Design
• User Experience Design (UX)
• E-Commerce, Magento, etc

Hurry and get your submissions in though - the deadline is April 26th!

If you weren't able to attend this year's PHPNE conference, the Inviqua techPortal has posted this glimpse into what happened during this day long event.

As a native geordie I was pleased to have a chance to attend a PHP conference in the north east. Even after living in Manchester for nearly a decade now, Newcastle still feels like home. [...] I arrived in plenty of time to enjoy the complimentary bacon sandwich and coffee on offer before finding some faces I recognised and settling in to the Electra Room where the main track was due to start, with Inviqa's very own Rowan Merewood taking to the stage to deliver the opening keynote.

He goes through each of the talks he attended (including the keynote) and gives an overview of their content:

• Building Better Developers (Rowan Merewood)
• API Driven Development: Eating Your Own Dog Food (Alex Bilbie)
• Measuring and Logging Everything in Real Time (Bastian Hofmann)
• Modernisation of legacy PHP applications using Symfony2 (Fabrice Bernhard)
• Introduction to Symfony CMF (Likas Kahwe Smith)
• Keeping The Cloud In Check (Thijs Feryn)

I took something from every talk and I don't really have a bad word to say about any of it. I hope this does not end up as the only PHPNE, it is only a shame that next year a new venue will likely need to be found as I expect demand for tickets will be high.

The PHP Argentina conference officially announced the sale of the tickets for this year's event (happening October 4th & 5th in Buenos Aires):

As of today we are opening the sale of PHP Conference Argentina tickets. And what better way than to offer a big incentive for those who get them early. [...] Hurry and get your ticket now! There is limited space, so you may be risking being left out. Remember that PHP Conference Argentina is the most important conference for developers in Latin America.

Tickets are discounted 50% off their regular price if you get them before the end of May and the first 50 tickets purchased will be entered into a raffle for a seat at the Speakers dinner. Speakers for this year's event include Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Andrei Zmievski, Mark Story, Nate Abele and Pablo Godel. They haven't announced the schedule yet, but it's coming soon.

For more information about the event or to get your tickets, check out the main conference site.

Brandon Savage has posted some ideas about making conferences better and how they can appeal to a wider (and maybe more inexperienced) level of developer.

I love PHP conferences. I attended a lot of PHP conferences when I was a brand new developer. Zendcon, OSCON, php[tek], Wordcamp Baltimore, DC PHP and others were my stomping grounds. I learned a lot, and the conferences I attended were on the whole useful, beneficial and wonderful experiences. But I also felt challenged by the fact that conferences don't offer much for bringing up new developers with concrete information and training. This isn't necessarily the fault of conferences: it's impossible to truly impart a useful skill into a developer with only a 45 minute talk.

He includes four ideas in the post and talks some about the role of training at the events:

• Are conferences even the right place for training?
• Creating Different Tracks of Different Lengths
• Including Hands-On Training During Tutorial Days
• Offer Learning-Focused Hackathons

He also notes that some of it is up to the developers to find a good fit for what they need and the skills they're looking to learn. There's other options out there besides just the usual conferences, too and, as Brandon states, "investing in your career is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself."

Due to some recent events at a PHP conference involving a company and their promotional tactics, a few members of the PHP community felt the need to share some of their thoughts about sexism in technology communities (some specifically in the PHP community). Here's the list of related posts and their authors:

• Cal Evans
• Matthew Turland
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Keith Casey
• Brandon Savage
• Amy Stephan
• Paul Jones
• Aral Balkan
• Anthony Ferrara

Several other comments were made on twitter, including responses from the webandphp Twitter account about the comments/posts being made.

UPDATE: The Web and PHP Magazine folks have posted an official response to the comments made about the situation.