Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

Hello, tekx! Day One: Tutorial Day

This week, I have the great privilege to attend (and speak at) tek-x, an awesome PHP conference in Chicago.  tek-x is focusing on the PHP Community which I really appreciate, so tek-x is the place for me.  As usual, I am going to document my way through the conference on the blog, so if you are not the tech-y type, you can just ignore me for a while

The night before tek-x started, I got to catch up with some old friends who I really only get to see once or (if I'm lucky) twice a year.  I know it's incredibly geeky, but I enjoyed talking shop with everyone.  Seeing what projects they are working on, complaining about the latest tech news (Apple vs. Adobe, Facebook vs. Privacy, etc), and just generally hanging out with people who have similar interest as mine is a lot of fun.  What was better was that we got to do all this over pizza and beer at Giordano's.  Their pizza was legen...wait for it...dary!  So awesome...

The next day the tutorials started.  The first session I went to was on Mongo DB.  Mongo is a completely new take on the traditional database strategy.  The idea is that you interact with your data as objects, and not tables and rows.  It totally challenges the relational database paradigm I have been working in for the last 10+ years.  Mongo is super fast and scalable, and you create all your data structures right in your code.  It is incredibly applicable to a lot of the projects I work on, especially Destination Analytics.  During the talk, I got Mongo up and running on my local machine, connected to it, and created a "hello world" type script to interact with it.  It was incredibly easy.

The other session I went to was about Code Reviews.  This session was 50% presentation and 50% actual reviewing of code.  We have been trying formal code reviews for a while, but I feel as though we aren't very good at them.  And they haven't become an enforced part of our development cycle.  With us using additional developers at NC State, we need to formalize this so that we are sure we are shipping quality and correct code.  The talk gave me some good hints about doing formal code reviews, including strategies for execution and tips on how.  The last half was looking at code from web2project.  It was interesting watching other people analyze code.  I thought it was incredibly beneficial, so it was definitely worthwhile.

After the sessions, Adobe sponsored an event for speakers at the Goose Island Brewery.  Their beer was absolutely fantastic.  I tried a few of them and had a great time with some other developers.  I even made some Raleigh connections when I met Matt Schmidt who works at DZone and is a NC State grad.  They are located in Cary and I had no idea.  The entire night was a blast.  Any time you can pick the brains of some of the smartest developers around, you take advantage of it.  Much thanks to Ryan Stewart at Adobe for setting it up.

That's it for day one.  The full conference starts tomorrow with lots of sessions.