It's been a week since I attended my very first PHP conference in Manchester, UK called PHPNW 2012. I didn't know what to expect and what the hype about this particular conference was all about, so I started my journey to Manchester with an open mind.
I packed my clothes and gear (laptop and iPad) and headed to Helsinki-Vantaa. As I waited for an airplance, I read up The Book by Symfony2. Lately, I've been getting more and more interest toward this framework as it seems to be built ease of use in mind, but also good coding standards, latest technology and very nice templating system called Twig.
Once I arrived at the airport I was picked up by Jenny Wong, one of the organizers of the event. I shared my ride with some other developers and speakers and we headed to her house for a little barbeque party. I got to meet some local developers there as well, and so we spent the evening talking about Symfony2, composer and related things.
On friday, I attended full-day tutorial on Zend Framework 2 held by Rob Allen (@Akrabat) and Evan McCoury (@EvanDotPro). Even though I was already quite familiar with the framework, it was nice to go through it all in little more detail. We had little exercises in between chapters, which was nice activity between slides.
After the tutorial there was an evening Hackathon event, in which attendees got to join different groups working on their project. Before the conference, I was talking to Lineke on IRC about their open source project called ProTalk, so this was a great opportunity to meet them in person and start hacking on their project. The wireless connection in the premises was a complete disaster though, as it took minutes just to load Github page. Luckily there was codebase available on memory stick along with vendor dependancies, so we got to hack the code after all with a little bite of pizza and beer.
Saturday started the official conference portion. There were speeches of different topics each hour lasting for fifty minutes each. I found particular interest in talk about new PHP 5.4 features, state of PHPUnit, Twig templating, and opportunities in open source. It was information packed day and while my brain started to process it all, we spent the rest of the evening at the bar without laptops this time. It was nice to meet even more new developers and share experiences with them.
Sunday was the last day of the conference. First I learned how BBC built their website on responsive layout and then I attended a talk about phpDocumentor2 which creates nice documentation of any project based on the DocBlocks in source code.
The closing of the conference was handled by keynote of Michelangelo van Dam, as he explained how companies could pitch in into the world of open source.
I could not be happier about attending the conference and would love to attend it again next year. The location was great, everything was organized with skilled people, conference contained interesting speakers and extra activity and the one could really feel like a part of a large community.
Inspired with all the experience, I revived this blog and will write here more often now.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti