On the Inviqua techPortal today they've posted a wrapup of this year's Dutch PHP Conference that just finished up in Amsterdam. Rowan Merewood shares some of his thoughts and experiences at the event.

Amsterdam is most definitely one of those cities that everyone should visit at least once in their life and I can highly recommend the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) as a reason to make that visit. This is also the second year that DPC has been joined by the Dutch Mobile Conference, a ticket to one gives you access to the other. This leads to a great mix of developers from different disciplines and generally means that regardless of your particular skill-set, there will be a talk running whose subject is completely new to you.

He walks through the (non-tutorial) days of the conference mentioning a few of the sessions (covering things like domain models, Lisp and hypermedia in APIs). He talks some about the keynotes - Google's Ade Oshineye on "A Web of Identity", Eamon Leonard's "Growth Hacking for Humans." and Kevlin Henney's "Worse is Better, for Better or for Worse" He also gave a talk himself about sorting and searching algorithms

On PHPMaster.com there's a new post from Aurelio De Rosa sharing some of his experiences at this year's phpDay conference.

Conferences play an important role in the process of becoming a better developer. When you attend a conference, you not only have the chance to listen to language or technology experts, but also the chance to meet other developers. This is ideal for expanding your networks of contacts to find, if needed, your next job. Last week I attended the phpDay 2013 conference in Verona and the following are some of the highlights of the talks I attended and what I learned.

The post talks about the two-day conference including details on some of the sessions covering things like PHP 5.5, dependency management with Composer, DevOps and high performance PHP.

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 the Liip blog Lukas Smith has posted a wrapup of the PHPUCEU (PHP Unconference Europe) and some of the sessions that made up the two day event.

So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. [...] This wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.

Presentations chosen and made at this year's unconference included:

• a talk about the PHPRC (PHP Content Repository)
• "Clean Puppet"
• Behavior Driven Development
• Agile documentation
• Hood.ie
• Symfony2 REST API
• NoSQL is Not the Answer

If you're interesting to see what the event was like, check out some of the photos they've posted to their site.

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.

In a new post to his site, Phil Sturgeon has a wrapup of CICONF (the CodeIgniter conference) that just finished in San Francisco:

This year the low-to-middle budget CodeIgniter Conference was held in San Francisco in a brilliant co-working space called Citizen Space. I didn't know at the time but this space is actually a partner of New Work City, the venue for CICON2011, so it was great to "keep it in the family".

He goes on to talk about some of the speakers that were at the even and gives summaries of the sessions as they were given. Topics included Paas (PagodaBox, specifically), Chef, Varnish, RESTful APIs and productivity with the CI framework. If you weren't able to attend, you can find slides and some videos of the event posted on its Lanyrd page.

The Northeast PHP Conference has wrapped up (this past weekend) and there were some great talks given and a good time had by a great group of attendees. If you weren't able to attend and want to catch up on some of the content presented at the event, check out the conference's page on Joind.in. There's links to slides for sessions like:

• High Performance PHP
• Gamestorming Your Product with Service Design
• ERD, Flowcharts and Other Documentation
• Creating an Epic RESTful API and Conquering the World
• How to Motivate Your Developers

This is just a small sampling of the sessions, so head over to the conference's page and get the full list! Congrats to the Northeast PHP organizers for not only having a great first year but for selling out the event!

On the ServerGrove blog today Pablo Godel has posted his wrapup of this year's phpDay/JsDay conferences that happened last week in Verona, Italy.

Last week I returned from Verona, Italy where I spent a full week with some of the best Javascript and PHP developers out there. I've been wanting to go to phpDay for a number of years so when I was invited to present a talk about Symfony2 and MongoDB, there were no more excuses, I had to be there!

Pablo talks about the sessions he attended (at both JsDay and phpDay) including Zeev Suraski's (Zend) keynote, a talk from Lorenzo Alberton about "Taming the Twitter Firehose" and his own presentation about MongoDB and Symfony2. He also mentions the second day's keynote from Rasmus Lerdorf and a workshop about building PHP extensions.

For those that couldn't attend this year's Whiskey Web conference and were wondering what it was like, you should check out this new summary from Marco De Bortoli on the Ibuildings techPortal.

Whisky Web is a brand new, fresh conference and the 2012 edition was the inaugural event, with hopefully many more to follow. This event has some familiar names from the PHP community behind it, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas and his helpers Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis.

He talks about several of the sessions including the keynotes from Josh Holmes and David Zuelke and other sessions covering things like estimation, Node.js, the rush into new technologies, testing legacy code and running applications in "the cloud".

On his "MySQL Talk" blog Joe Devon has posted a (very) belated wrapup of ZendCon 2011 he attended earlier this year.

I started writing a Zendcon recap post as soon as I got back. And then mis-timed a couple projects. Note to freelancers, make sure your new gig starts AFTER your old gig is over. Or you'll be working an insane schedule. Hence the lateness... First the good part. What made Zendcon special.

He notes that it was a great opportunity to meet people "in real life" that he'd only spoken with online and the overall wonderful experience it was. He mentions some specific people in the PHP community including Juozas Kaziukenas, Daniel Cousineau, some impromptu singing of Queen songs and many more (too many to name here). He also mentions some of the sessions attended including the tutorial on Zend Framework and an uncon talk from Ilia Alshanetsky about optimization.