It has been more than two weeks since ZendCon, yet I can't seem to manage to find the time to recap the event. (Work has been keeping me busy.) This will be brief.

Note: My photos from the conference are available on SmugMug with a few select ones on Flickr.

Here are a few tidbits that I can manage to remember:

• There were about 550 people registered, making ZendCon the largest PHP-only conference.
• I got to meet a few people like Wolfgang Drews, Aaron Wormus, and Jennifer Goodie.
• My tutorial, Essential PHP Security, was well-attended and very well-received. (I'll catch up on publishing slides to our talks page soon.)
• Cal Evans (and some other Zend folks) created a deck of playing cards featuring members of the PHP community. (I'm the Jack of Diamonds.)
• We handed out a free PHP Quick Guide and sponsored the Expo Happy Hour, which means we paid for everyone to drink free beer and wine. :-)
• I had a lot of fun with George's fisheye lens.
• During his talk, Wez likened non-persistent database connections to phone calls, describing how persistent connections let you avoid the "shooting the shit" part.
• Andrei dressed up as a White Russian for Halloween. Sara dressed up as the Princess of PECL.
• The conference seemed to be running about 15 minutes behind schedule all week, which lead to the Armorize guy getting abruptly cut off, just as he was getting to the good stuff.

After the conference, a few of us went to see Shane speak at Yahoo about Komodo, which has some really nice debugging features, especially for people who develop heavily in both JavaScript and PHP and need to see what's happening at every step.

On Friday, we went to see Borat, which was extreme in every way. I can't remember laughing so hard for so long.

Saturday night was Andrei's 30th birthday party, featuring the I Love White Russians shirts that I ordered. (George took the picture featured on the shirt, and you can find the original on Flickr.)

It was a good week and a good conference, but now it's time to get back to work.