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

tekx Day 3

Day 3 of tekx started with a presentation of developer trends by Matthew Schmidt from DZone.  I had met Matthew on the second night here at the Adobe party and we discovered that we were both from the Raleigh area.  Always great to meet new PHPers from the Triangle.  His magazine is like a digg for developers, so his talk was about what trends he saw over the past year.  The most interesting thing that I heard was that users who are migrating to Chrome are doing so at Firefox’s expense and not IE’s.  I guess we are all looking for a better, less resource intensive browser.  I too have decided to give Chrome the ol’ college try, so we’ll see how that goes.

The rest of the days talks went like this:

• I checked out Matthew Turland’s talk on the new SPL Features in PHP 5.3.  Turns out, PHP is getting all grown up with real live data structures like linked lists and heaps.  Neato for the Computer Science geek that dwells within me.
• Next was Nate Abele and Joël Perras’s talk about Lithium.  Joël and I talked a bit about Lithium earlier in the conference, and it sounded neat.  They skated the line of sarcasm with lines like “All Frameworks Suck” a little too much, and I honestly think their message got lost.  I still wanna check it out, but the presentation would not have sold me on it had it not been for talking with Joël offline.
• Next was Measuring Your Code, again with Nate Abele.  It was a pretty interesting talk about gathering metrics about your code, but it wasn’t a whole lot of new info for me.

After these sessions, I was feeling kinda drained so I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Hack Track hacking on Zend Framework.  Today and tomorrow are bug hunt days, so I figured I would give a shot at fixing some bugs.  In actuality, the network was so darn slow that I didn’t get a chance to actually fix anything, but I did download and install lithium and got a project stood up with it and Mongo DB very quickly.

During the Hack Track, I had some good conversation with a bunch of folks about PHP, community, contributing to open source, and all sorts of stuff.  There are some really awesome people that come to these conferences and they are always willing to help out.  Good times.

Dinner was on our own, so I made the trek to PF Changs, which is becoming a tradition any time I go to a conference.  After dinner, Microsoft sponsored a gaming night where “Jason and the Thundercats” made our world debut on the Rock Band stage.  “American Woman” never sounded so sweet.

I didn’t stay at the part long as I wanted to rehearse and tweak my slides for my presentation that I had to give the next day.  I had to go downstairs because the internet in my room sucked, which led to me catching up with some more folks and having more good conversation over a beer.  I freakin love this conference...