This is the first event of this type I've been at and I must say that it was a bit odd :) Normally at the evenings of conferences ppl mingle in the bar, takes a couple of drinks and discuss the day.
Here the bar was filled with groups of developers hacking away at their notebooks...
Not sure how many ppl there was, I heard 3-400 but that sounded a bit high.
So how was it?
Pretty good, went to two seminars on PHP Performance and PHP 5 by Ilia Alshanetsky that was really good. He's not only extremely knowledgable on PHP, he's a good speaker as well. These two was the highlight for me.
I also went to How PHP Ticks with a speaker from EZ Publish, also a knowledgable guy but not really my topic.
Refactoring and State of the art development by Stefan Priebsch that covered PHPUnit tests, Phing and more was also interesting.
I went to a couple more as well that was fair to far from good though, sometime I whish that speakers would prepare just a little bit before holding a seminar...
One thing that surprised me was that while both Oracle and Zend was there as sponsors, only Oracle took the chance to speak. One would think that Zend as "the PHP company" would take the chance to demo their productline in a seminar, but nope. Just a small stand with some demo cd's and broshures...
Some pics:
The keynote:
This is just about what the exhibition was, a few more tables, but that's it.
And here's the hotel, from the entrance and upwards :)
Unfortunately the pictures from the bar of all the participants banging away on their computers turned out all too dark :(
One really fun thing was that a guy I know from www.ozoneasylum.com "Tyberius Prime" lives close to Frankfurt so he dropped by the hotel for a chat. Really nice guy.
Well, that's it for now, laters! /Dan
