There's a quick post over on Stefan Koopmanschap's blog about the recently wrapped Dutch PHP TestFest that happened in conjunction with the PFZ.nl and AmsterdamPHP user groups.

The PHP TestFest that Dutch usergroups PFZ.nl and AmsterdamPHP organized last saturday was a huge success. About 15 people made their way to the office of WEBclusive to collaborate with three key figures from the PHP-world, who travelled to Amsterdam to be a mentor, to write tests for PHP.

He mentions some of the work that was done including updates to tests on the Gearman extension, the MongoDB extension and others worked on the tests for PHP's core. Fifty-four new tests were written during the event and testers even continued writing after they left - win all around!

Freek Lijten recently attended a conference put on by PFZ.nl, a one day event of PHP content on a wide range of topics. He shares some of his impressions about the event and why he thinks they're a valuable part of any developer's experience in their field.

I had a great time for three main reasons: I learned new stuff, I met people and I got inspired by topics I already knew about. I like to (shortly) share on the experience itself and I hope to explain why I think it is valuable to visit a conference every once in a while.

He recaps the conference, mentioning the talks he attended (including one on the PHP community and a keynote from Zeev Zuraski of Zend about the state of PHP) and compliments the group for putting on a good event. He also includes his three reasons he thinks everyone should attend an event like this:

• It's a great place to learn about new tools and things you didn't know about current ones
• It's inspiring to be around fellow developers and get excited about the technology
• You meet new people that you might not ever have in just your day to day development work