ZendCon '09

See ZendCon '09 at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last year I had the privilege of attending ZendCon '08 and next month I'll be traveling again to Silicon Valley for ZendCon '09, "the larget event of the PHP community." At last year's conference I met a bunch of amazing people from the PHP community, saw several really good talks, and was one of the first to become a Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) in Zend Framework (the exam was announced at the conference).

This year I'm looking forward to seeing people in person again that I met last year and meeting others who I've only talked with online. The session lineup is looking good and I'm also very interested in attending some of the unconference sessions again. If you're going to be there, let me know so we can connect.

ZendCon Summary

See ZendCon Summary at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Rafael Dohms has posted a good summary of ZendCon '08. He touches on several topics including performance, testing and code analysis, PHP's integration with other technologies, Zend Framework, and some interesting things to look forward to in 2009 including Ibuildings' PHP Center of Expertise.

ZendCon Highlights Presentation

See ZendCon Highlights Presentation at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

I presented highlights from ZendCon at last night's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting. I've uploaded my slides for anyone who wants to take a look. The presentation uses the S5 slide show format in case you are curious.

ZendCon Highlights at PHP UG Meeting

See ZendCon Highlights at PHP UG Meeting at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

I'll be presenting some highlights from ZendCon at this Thursday's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting. We'll be meeting at Draker Laboratories from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Hope to see you there!

ZendCon 2008

See ZendCon 2008 at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

ZendCon 2008 wrapped up last week. This was my first time going to ZendCon and it was definitely worth it. There were over 650 people and over 60 sessions at the Santa Clara conference. I'll try to post summaries and highlights from the sessions I attended. It was a great opportunity to attended presentations from some of the most well respected people in the PHP community including Vermont's own Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend Technologies), Mike Naberezny (Maintainable Software), Sebastian Bergmann (eZ Systems), Derick Rethans (eZ Systems), Ben Galbraith (Ajaxian.com) , Marcus Boerger (Google), and Ben Ramsey (Schematic).

Last Tuesday during the opening keynote Zend announced the new Zend Framework certification. I was fortunate enough to get a testing slot on Thursday morning. After reading the 214 page study guide on Wednesday I passed the test, so am now a Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) in Zend Framework! If you plan on taking the test, I definitely recommend reading the study guide. I've been using Zend Framework since 1.0 and I'm not sure I would have passed if I hadn't read the study guide.