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

tekx Day 2 Sessions

Day 2 of tekx was actually the first real conference day full of sessions.  The day started out with a bang from Josh Holmes who delivered a keynote that rang true in so many ways.  His talk was about the importance of keeping our programming and our problems simple.  I am as guilty as any developer of over-engineering a problem and it has slowed me down quite a few times.  An excellent example that sticks out to me was when he talked about how the initial idea of twitter was so simple, most of us developers would have been like "it's not worth us working on it because that is a way too simple problem to solve".  He's right too.  When I first saw twitter, I was like "I could do that".  But the point is, I didn't because I was too concerned with the complex problems.  Anyway, it was a great keynote.  I even tweeted during that keynote that I was going to make all my developers watch it.

I went to a few other interesting talks as well.

• I started with Rob Allen's talk on Zend_Form which really was a refresher course to me.  I did catch a few new hints, mainly using a translator to do custom error messages in Zend_Form.
• I followed that up with a talk about Graph theory which was incredibly relevant to the state of social media.  It was also a good bit of stuff I hadn't heard about since I was in college, so it was good to get back into that.
• I spent a dual session hanging out with Keith Casey and writing some Flex.  I used Flex a few years ago but never had a use for it, but it seems to have grown up a bit since I used it last.  The talk got me thinking about ways I can apply it to some of my projects.
• Next up was Eli White's talk on code and release management.  I had one of those moments that you have at these conferences like "thank god I'm doing this right".  It was good to hear that we hadn't screwed anything up too bad...yet.
• The last talk of the day was Matthew Weier O'Phinney about NoSQL.  Matthew always does a good talk that is really informative, and this was no different.  I'm definitely going to look into Mongo DB, which is a NoSQL database, when we get back.

The day ended with a few of us going out to Gino's Pizza for dinner.  It was pretty good, but Giordano's was better IMO.  When we got back, I was so exhausted that I went to bed early.  Long day of learning.