I spent this weekend at PHPNW's second annual conference in Manchester - and I loved it. The sessions were informative, the venue was comfy (the floor in track 1 was much better than the seats ) and clean, and the food was outstanding. I met lots of awesome people (most of whom I can't remember by name... sorry!) in the bar, and have lots of new ideas that were sparked by the presentations.

Unfortunately I had to travel from Leeds and back again each day (if anyone wants to put me up in a hotel next time I go to a conference, please feel free!) - so I missed Kevlin Henney's keynote on "The Uncertainty Principle". Looking through the comments on joind.in it looks as though I missed a light hearted yet thought provoking session.

I managed to sneak in just before the start of the talks, and decided to attend Lorna's talk on "Passing the Joel test in PHP". SPL looked quite interesting, but I took a look at it online before the conference and it looked like something I wouldn't ever need to use. I'm glad I chose Lorna's talk. It was well planned, well presented, and set the bar for the rest of the conference (coincidentally, I believe Lorna's was the best talk of the conference). The Joel Test is a list of twelve criteria used to gauge the quality of a development team. The list was originally written with desktop application developers in mind, but Lorna easily took it and showed how it can apply to web projects too. While explaining how the criteria could be used with web developers, she also shared her experiences while trying to meet the criteria, and what she found to be the best practices.

Rowan Merewood followed Lorna with his talk "Tools and Talent". He started by telling us about:

A documentary about a group
who found a start-up company
form a successful team
and successfully use new tools
to solve problems no-one knew they had

That could be any old company that has a new product they want to build, but this team was special, very special indeed. They were the Ghostbusters They had the ideas man - Raymond Stantz, the salesman - Peter Venkman and the techie - Egon Spengler. There were two more roles that Winston and Gozer filled, but I can't remember them right now.

After Rowan's talk, we had a break for lunch. I was expecting sandwiches and a cup of tea, and I was pleasantly surprised. They served a selection of dishes, I personally went for the duck which was amazing.

After the break, I attended Thomas Weinert's talk on "Optimising Your Front End Performance". Unfortunately, I'd say that this was the talk I was most disappointed with. Thomas had some interesting points, but the level of the presentation was slightly above my level of understanding. Rob Allen was giving a talk on "Getting a website out of the door" at the same time, which recieved some great reviews. I wish I'd have attended that one

Derick Rethans, the author of XDebug, was up next. He showed us how useful XDebug is when profiling and debugging applications [slides]. It's something that I don't use yet, but I'll definitely be installing it and utilizing it's features in my next project.

I'm quite involved with Codeigniter, but I'm always on the lookout for new frameworks to try out. Steve Richardson gave an Introdution to Yii, using the tried and tested "Write a blog in 30 minutes" example. There was a log of copying and pasting to make sure the demo was finished in time, but it still hooked me in and I'll be checking out Yii in future. The only other point I could make about this talk was that it received some negative feedback about the fact that he couldn't answer some questions that were posed. Steve's just a guy who found a framework that he likes, and he put in the effort to show it to us - fair play to him!

Scott MacVicar (aided/heckled by Sara Golemon) rounded off the day with a talk on how to get involved with the PHP project. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get involved with the testing of the language, and very surpised at how small the PHP project team was (only 30 or so core, if I remember correctly ). Again, this presentation inspired me, and I think I'll be getting involved in the next testfest I can find.

Teatime next! We had chicken curry or chilli to choose from. I went for the chicken, and it was pretty good. I think I was spoilt at lunch with the duck, otherwise I'd be saying it was great too. Sun sponsored the bar afterwards (rather generously! It took around 150 of us us 6 hours to drink it dry), and I spent the time meeting new people and even managed to get into a jQuery/mootools holy war

I got the last train home (23:40)/first train (07:00) back, both of which were rail replacement buses. Sharing a total of 3 and a half hours on a bus (for a journey that usually takes 1h20m) with drunken people (in both directions). I can't say that either journey was much fun, considering that I had only managed to get 2 hours of sleep.

The sunday sessions were at the Museum of Science and Industry. I managed to catch Ben Scholzen's talk on "Tokens and Lexemes". It's a pretty interesting topic, even though I couldn't see a practical use for it at the time. I've since found a very, very useful application.

Juliette Reinders Folmer was talking about UTF-8 in the second talk of the day. There were some things that I made a note of to make life easier when starting new projects, but there was nothing that new to me.

I took a break after Juliette to run through my presentation while Rick Ogden gave an Introduction to OOP. Unfortunately, I overran and missed most of Sara's talk, "PHP5.3: Hot or Not?" It's a shame, as it's the talk I was looking forward to the most. I did get lots of ideas on how to improve my talk in future thanks to BinaryKitten.

My talk went alright. Now that it's over, I would do most of it differently. Particularly that the talk seemed very disjointed, using many different examples. Next time, I'll just use one example, and demonstrate all the functions on one page. I wish I'd have prepared more, instead of just trying to wing it as I did at UnSheffield. The bits that I'd thought about in advance and knew what I was going to say went down well. Despite all this, I received some good feedback. I know everyone is always complimentary with their feedback, so if there's anything you think I could have done better please let me know. I'll never improve otherwise

And there we have it, my weekend at PHPNW09. I loved every minute of the conference, and will definitely be attending again next year.

Around the web

Lorna's writeup
Rick's writeup
Loonyblurb's writeup

Related posts:

1. PHPNW09
2. FOWD Tour Leeds
3. UnSheffield
4. Think Visibility
5. PHPNW09 – My Presentation