If you haven’t submitted your proposals yet, now is a great time to do so (you know, before the new-year celebrations kick in, and you get distracted by more… urgent fun). Don’t forget, you don’t need to be a professional speaker to present at tek—all you need is a great idea and an infective passion that will rub off on your fellow attendees. Some of the best speakers we’ve ever hosted were first timers—and we love to invite new people to speak every year!

Well, what are you waiting for? Head on over to our CfP page, where you can find out more about the proposal process, and submit several of your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

As I write this post, I am sitting in the back of the room at one of the CodeWorks ’11 stops. I think back to all the friends – new and old – that I’ve talked to on this tour, and I begin to realize something important. While the PHP community is made up of a bunch of great developers, almost all of them work in more than just PHP. Many develop front-end code in JavaScript. Some work in mobile using Java or Objective-C. Some work with Ruby, Perl and Node.js in additional to PHP. Our professional lives are more complex than can be described by a single community. We are all still members of the PHP community, and I hope we all still identify ourselves as PHP developers, but we are all so much more.

That is what we are looking for at tek ’12; we want to know what you are working on and how you are integrating PHP and other technologies to build new things.

Of course, we are looking for good, solid PHP talks; there are always people who want to brush-up on the fundamentals. Integration, though, is what will catch our attention.

So put on your thinking caps and pull the strap tight. Look at what you’ve worked on in the past 12 months. What have you done to integrate PHP with other technologies? What have you learned that you want to share with others? What have you built that is cool? Answer these questions, and you are well on your way to a winning presentation.

A side note, a lot of people ask me “How can I improve my chances of getting a talk accepted?” I’ve written on this in the past “Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference” and all of those points are still valid. I would like to add one that we will call tek specific, because I don’t know about how other conferences feel. For tek, submit multiple talks. We try to get each speaker on-stage twice so we not only need a good idea form you, we need two. Some people submit as many as eight or nine, I don’t necessarily encourage that behavior but give us more than one.

I hope to see you at tek ’12!

=C=

tek11 will continue the five year tradition of the PHP community gathering in Chicago to share ideas and inspiration. Last year, a great time was had by all and this year will be no different. Get your ticket today and make sure you are there in May!

CodeWorks 2010 (CWX for short) is a series of one-day technical conferences presented by the php|architect team and sponsored by Adobe. It’s slated to stop in five cities, starting November 9th:

• Seattle, WA (Nov. 9)

• Portland, OR (Nov. 11)

• Austin, TX (Nov. 13)

• Baltimore, MD (Nov. 15)

• Orlando, FL (Nov. 17)

Each stop features talks presented by the php|a gang on various PHP-related topics, including object orientation, scalability, security, development tools and efficiently building your own APIs. CWX is ideal for both developers at all levels and technical managers who want to get a handle on the latest techniques and developments in the PHP world.

Tickets to CWX are $100— if you purchase before September 30th you can take advantage of our early-bird program and save $25. Each ticket also comes with your very own annual subscription to php|architect—a $35 value—with our compliments!

Open source is a life style. — Michelangelo Van Dam

Some developers identify open source with weekends spent coding and programs given away for free, but this is not the full picture nor a balanced one. Open source consists not only in contributing to projects with code or documentations, but also in every other activity that provides value to the community: you don’t need to patch the PHP core to be active in the open source movement.

For example, in the last year I published a lot of material on my personal blog, including a free ebook on practical testing in PHP applications. As a result of the exposure my articles gave me, I got to be employed as a freelance blogger here at php|architect and to speak at my first conference.

There are also more immediate benefits from writing for the community: if English is not your native language, using it nearly everyday will also improve your proficiency. English is one of the standards of the open source world and of the business one.

Code

Of course also code can be important: for example, my contributions to Doctrine 1 and 2 gave me credibility when writing about it. We usually can’t show our private projects since they are confidential, and certainly a customer won’t let you open source his website.

Writing code samples is a mandatory step in the interviews of every place where you would want to work. If your code is out in the wild, it has double value: first, for the users of the project you helped and second, for you to show your skills to potential employers. If you take the step of jumping from the perspective of an end-user of a framework or a library to a contributor or active developer, would you then need a certification? What sounds better on your résumé, that you can work with Zend Framework, or that you created a part of it?

Moreover, writing open source code makes you learn new patterns and practices, and you can choose what you are interested in so that your work won’t be boring. This is one of the factors that makes working on open source attractive where no monetary reward is present: the joy of hacking.

Once you have started coding on open source projects, your contributions can make your name recognized: people dig into source code very often and @author annotation remains naturally impressed after seeing many of them. Years ago I wondered who this Sebastian Bergmann was.

Open source your career

Thus, participating in the community with code, articles, documentation, and whatever provides value to others can really help your career. Often in subtle ways: the web is open to anyone and you never know who is receiving your content. For instance, Lorna Jane Mitchell came to know that one of the reasons she stands out during candidate selection and now works at iBuildings was an Oracle podcast she did for zend.com.

Now she is giving a talk about open source stories, and she’s looking for people that are willing to recount to her how contributing to the open source movement have helped them advance in their careers. If you feel community involvement helped you get where you are, tell her your story.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

And that is why this fall is so special!  The 10th anniversary of the International PHP Conference will turn Germany’s Mainz into the world’s PHP capital and the fun then moves onto the sunny shores of Barcelona where palm trees and sun add a very interesting spice.  Calling all speakers!  Calls for papers open!

The International PHP Conference

The International PHP Conference has recently opened its call for papers for its 10th anniversary edition, and in its announcement it makes it very clear that it’s going to be one hell of a show.  Ten years is a long time and if the other nine conferences have been superb events, this one is going to be a real cracker.  In fact, they haven’t even waited for the summer edition to end before announcing their fall event!  Scheduled for the 11th to the 13th of October it will draw together the finest and most admired, as well as the most passionate and eager.  Feel like hitting the stage?  Now’s your chance to submit and compete for a place in an amazing three-day schedule!

The PHPBarcelona Conference

The PHPBarcelona Conference is an event run by the PHPBarcelona user group, and it shows in all the little details.  It started off as a small half-day event and, reaching its fourth edition, there is no doubt regarding its quality and potential and it has quickly become a key event in the calendar.  It’s not just about the PHP rock stars, it’s not only about the amount of talent present…  It’s about the enormous quality of its content and all the fun that speakers and attendees alike share during both days.  Looking to enjoy the last traces of summer?  Then head to Barcelona on the 22nd to the 23rd of October. Their call for papers is also open!

So, if you have something to say and only need a stage to say it on, head for Europe this fall and get your message in the streets!

In the morning, Dustin Whittle from Yahoo! presented YQL, a SQL-derived language that can be used to access hundreds of web services. The Yahoo! platform translates SQL-like queries (such as SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE) into requests, eliminating the need to learn a new API for every different service to integrate in the PHP application. Whittle also talked about the open source platform the teams at Yahoo built, which includes PHP in the front end.

Meanwhile, Daniele Teti explained the process of Continuos Integration for PHP applications in one of the most crowded sessions here at Corropoli. This year’s topic, quality, has influenced the choice of talks which have been widely considered interesting.

Fabien Potencier also gave his talk on Dependency Injection in the last morning session. The symfony project leader built from scratch a Dependency Injection container using PHP 5.3, while at the same time demonstrating anonymous functions and closures. He said he wants to bring PHP to the next level, and he now preaches Dependency Injection as he was pitching the use of frameworks and the adoption of testing in the last years.

The three tracks of the conference are loosely connected, so that talks from different tracks usually do not overlap the same development field (for example Windows-related talks are grouped in the same track every day.) Though, lots of people would have split in two to follow both Fabien Potencier and Dustin Whittle and their absorbing sessions.

About the PHP on Windows track, the Microsoft guys have done a good job in showing how the attitude of their company towards PHP has radically changed. PHP is now seen as an empowering tool instead of a menace to .NET, and Microsoft demonstrates his support for PHP on Windows Server with WinCache (the equivalent of Apc) and the SQL Server driver for PDO. The evangelist of Microsoft Italia Pietro Brambati has also announced the creation of an Italian user group dedicated to support PHP applications on IIS.

One of the most eye-opening talks was held by Felix De Vliegher (from iBuildings), who showed a set of use cases and PHP client code for Gearman. Gearman is an open source daemon to dispatch processing requests to a list of nodes (workers), and it is supported in PHP both as an PECL extension and as a PEAR client library. The use of Gearman can aid PHP scripts in dealing with intensive tasks which should be offsourced to other machines to offer a prompt response to the user.

Remember that all the slides from the conference will be available on SlideShare in the next days, as the speakers get the time to upload them. Furthermore, the majority the videos of the talks have been recorded on ustream and can be viewed at any time even if you did not participate to phpDay.

05-20-2010 – Fixed spelling of Felix’s name.

CMS Expo, held annually, is a conference that brings together representatives from prominent Open Source CMS systems along with domain experts and even some proprietary tool vendors. The conference has two goals:

• Introduce CMS seekers to the breadth of Open Source options
• Educate new adopters about their chosen CMS system

To that end, the conference has tracks for Drupal, Plone, WordPress, and Joomla! as well as a Foundations track (focused on cross-CMS fundamentals) and a Power track that showcases emerging solutions and technologies. It is rounded out with a business track that focused on topics of special interest to enterprises. Even systems like HippoCMS and ezSystems have made their presence known here.

The atmosphere of the conference is congenial, with emphasis on cross pollination between projects. Even the speakers have found it useful to get to know representatives from rival offerings. As author and Drupal developer Emma Jane Hogbin put it, ‟I think the strong suit of the conference is that developers from one CMS have been able to attend sessions for other CMSes and understand whether they needed to re-evaluate their own architectural decisions and or adopt or develop new features.″

One remarkable feature of the conference is its emphasis on meeting the audience’s needs in spite of the technical diversity and interests of the audience. Most of the presentations are light on code and heavy on concepts. But this doesn’t mean they are dumbed down. Many attendees have noted how accessible and useful the tracks have been to managers, administrators, developers, and designers alike.

I talked to Lina Coonen from the CMS Association to find out about next year’s conference. With this year’s success, the hope for the future is ‟to build on the idea of finding the right tool for the right job and offering more decision making session where attendees can compare multiple CMSes on many levels.″

This year’s main topic at phpDay will be Quality Assurance in PHP. However, the scheduled talks and workshops range from Agile and Extreme Programming practices to emerging technologies in the PHP landscape, for the joy of hands-on developers.

Although it is a conference based in Italy, phpDay 2010 is fundamentally an international event. While the first day is focused on workshops, the central day (May 14th) features a variety of English talks both on methodology topics and technical ones such as Flex integration in PHP and development for the cloud computing platform Windows Azure.

Furthermore, some well-known personalities from the PHP community will be in Italy to give their talks. Fabien Potencier, Sensio’s CEO and project leader of the symfony framework, is probably the most famous guest and will give a presentation on Dependency Injection in PHP. Other notable speakers are Dustin Whittle, evangelist for Yahoo! Open Strategy that will report about the PHP platform built at Yahoo!; Mihai Corlan from Adobe who will talk about the combination of Flex on client and PHP on the server for web applications; and PEAR’s president David Coallier with his talks on RESTful APIs and data storage on the cloud.

The choice of a small city for the location lessened the overall costs and made possible to bring these speakers to Italy: the organizer, GrUSP, is a non-profit organization managed by Italian PHP programmers. Of course, the tickets are less expensive in respect to larger conferences, but the quality of the event is testified by the list of sponsors, which comprehends Zend, Microsoft and Yahoo! Developer Network.

Conferences are an opportunity for time-effective, intensive learning but also networking events where you can meet some of the people that really make the PHP world go around. The location also opens the possibility to try real espresso and pizza in their Italian reference implementation: you’re still in time to register for phpDay 2010.

Josh will be presenting our opening keynote, “The Lost Art of Simplicity” and a regular session “The Lost Art of Simplicity“.