php|works Recap

• Mon, 17 Sep 2007 at 09:23:53 GMT
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Another conference has come and gone. As always, the folks at php|architect hosted a good conference, and it was nice to meet some new people and see old friends. There weren't even any hotel snafus this time. :-)

I really enjoyed my keynote. Not only was this my first keynote, it was also the first talk I've given that was more entertaining than educational. I even enjoyed preparing for it, which is unusual. For those who missed it, I provided a regular expression that automatically converts your code from PHP 4 to PHP 5, began the search for PHP 4's killer (and received an unsolicited confession from Derick), revealed Wez and Andrei as zombies, and demonstrated a couple of ways to test your legacy applications with PHP 5, one for those who test and one for those who don't. In retrospect, ending the talk after the serious part probably wasn't the best idea, since the energy from earlier had mostly subsided. Other than that, I think everyone had fun.

My other talk, Security 2.0, was also a fun talk, partly because it's constantly evolving. Covering everything within an hour is almost impossible, but I managed to get pretty close. I'm looking forward to giving a longer version of this talk at The Future of Web Apps next month. For those who saw the talk, the pixelated characters are the work of Jon Tan, inspired in part by The IT Crowd. You'll hopefully be seeing more of the WebAppSec Crowd soon.

Digg and Facebook were represented at the conference, with Eli White of Digg and Lucas Nealan and Brian Shire of Facebook all giving talks.

Terry Chay of Tagged stole the show with his talk, Finding Art in Software Architecture. Concerns that Terry had mellowed in recent years were quickly put to rest; his energy and expletive-count were back to all-time highs. (Maybe all he needed was a new camera.) He discussed stability, scalability, speed, and security as layers, advising developers to focus on these issues in order. The experience was shared, to a certain extent, with everyone on #phpc.

Now it's time to get back to work. We're celebrating our 10-year anniversary this week!