My fearless leader (Matthew Weier O’Phinney) readying himself for a framework shootout.
Last week, I had the privilege of being sent by Purple, Rock, Scissors to ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA. Just now, I’m getting to writing about it. Between work chaos, frustrating flight cancellations and the flu being generously given to me during the trip–I’ve simply been wiped out.
The Trip
[Creative writing license, start... now:] This was my first trip to San Jose, it was also my first trip to get punched in the eye socket by a flight attendant. To be fair, it wasn’t a malicious punch, but more a harmless elbow drop to pleasantly awake me from my deep slumber for in-flight beverages. Fortunately, they had apple juice, so there were no problems. On the trip back, my flight was cancelled and I got the flu, however on the bright side I did get to see Chet from MTV’s Real World raging at US Airways Customer Service–this was very awesome.
The Conference
For my first PHP-centric conference, I found this to be a very pleasant experience. While there were some definite weak talks, there were some real amazing ones; Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Rob Allen, Ilia Alshanetsky and Jim Plush were undoubtably the stars in my eyes (of the sessions I attended). However, without the Unconference talks, I’m unsure if my reaction to the conference as a whole would be as stellar. I’d like to extend my personal thanks for those who decided to get in front of people to talk for the Uncon’s; they were fantastic. My main beef were the official sessions I got stuck in which ended up being sales pitches for such-and-such company’s product, but fortunately I was able to dodge many of them.
The final session, the Framework Shootout, had some very interesting content. It was a lineup between Zend Framework, Symfony, CakePHP, Agavi and CodeIgniter, who were all armed with nerf guns [Ha-ha, get it?! Shootout!]. Generally it was nothing new, I didn’t leave feeling any different about the frameworks, except that I dislike CakePHP even more.
What was most alarming to me was the discussion of PHP 5.3–all frameworks are moving towards supporting 5.3 except Symfony. Fabien seemed extremely opposed to the community move to the latest minor release of PHP: very disappointing. I can’t speak much into this topic because I’m still fairly baffled by the comments he made, but just curious where the logic is coming from. We’ll see if he was just grumpy or serious down the road. At the end of the day: Zend Framework, you’re still my love.
The People
It wasn’t long after my arrival that I was able to find people from #zftalk. To be perfectly honest, I was a little taken back by the lack of stereotyped nerds that I was expecting to see. You know the ones you see in the movies, but not like Swordfish because Hugh Jackman is in that and has some virus programmed of cool, spinning cubes. But like I was saying, there wasn’t any shortage of interesting people to meet or topics to talk about, especially thanks to the #zendcon channel on IRC that people were a part of during the sessions. I was a particular fan of the guys at GitHub, primarily because I got great responses from them about some API issues I’m having with ZFExchange [the new name for ZFComponents].
The End
At the end of the day, I was very pleased with the conference. I wish I could’ve been at more places at once to see more talks but that’s not possible. Or is it…? A group of us were able to use Google Wave to collaborate on taking notes from mulitple sessions so we didn’t miss anything. Since not everyone can get access to these (because they don’t have Google Wave invites), I’ll be putting copies of them on my personal wiki later for people to read.
Thanks to Zend (Eli White) for putting together a great conference, I look forward to hopefully seeing everyone a year from now. And of course, thanks to PRPL for giving me the opportunity to go. 
