php|tek09: Day #2

Ok, i might be a little “DUI” as I write this, but bear with me, i can get it done.

Day #2 kicked off well with a group breakfast again and off we went to the main ballroom for the keynote. Suddenly we get “news” jaws drop to the floor, girlish screams are heard .. Andrei has been kidnapped and Tabini has the picture to prove it. I guess you can ignore and obfuscate the guy behind php|arch and php|tek for so long before he flips! Tabini then went on to talk a bit on arch and tek and finally announced that Andrei was alive..

Andrei came out and delivered on an awesome keynote! Showing us the news in PHP 5.3 and giving us the word on PHP 6, with some fresh news from the PHP Dev Meeting, all with plenty internal jokes and funny pics, a keynote worth watching again!

The day went on with great sessions, so i’ll mentions the ones i went to. First up was Eli White, Zend’s new goto guy, on scaling applications. An awesome talk that showed interesting techniques and their evolution, an excelent way of showing you scaling so you realize the “incremental” nature of it. From that i jumped on the search train with Derick’s “Of needles and Haystacks” a peek into the world of search strategies and an introduction to Lucene and Solr.

Lunch as usual was really good and i got in some interesting conversation with Derick and Sara Golemon. After which i headed to Lig’s inaugural session on MySQL tuning, the first session I know of that looked into “settings” tuning, not just query/hardware techniques. Elizabeth followed up dwelling into the twilight zone.. the SPL Zone, showing us the wonderful land of iterators (iteratoriterator.. iterataaaaah) and giving a shout out to the community for help to get all this documented, this is where you com in!

I then moved on to the ballroom to see Sebastian teaching us to test untestable code, or rather, how to fix it and get it done, right! It was an excelent session and eye opening to get some unit testing problems i have had in the past. And that was followed by a surprising and very inspiring talk by Chris Shifflet. Security Driven Design was not a code talk, but a reflection point applying various techniques to web site security, making us all think of how to implement all these diferente things in the most diferent aspects of web development, aside from being a great guy Chris was very inspiring on this talk.

There was still time, so we got the UnCon session going, and i decided to get more info on how to use git to take svn offline with Zend Framework’s own Matthew, a short but very objective session that got me curious and interested in using git.

The evening events would begin later on, so we skipped the hotel to get some genuine out-of-mexico-mexican-food, which was really good. We got back just in time to hit the open bar and watch the Pecha Kucha sessions.. which were way too funny to describe here, suffice it so say Tetraboy won with his LOLCode presentation! Ah.. and I also brought down a genuine bottle of Aged Cachaça and it surely made some sucess.

Another awesome day ate tek, tomorrow more talks and retro-gaming night! Tek-on!