If you were last week in Chicago, you've might felt the city was buzzing PHP all over the place. php[tek] 2013 was taking place at the Sheraton Gateway Suites Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont, just outside of Chicago city. This year it was also the first time Musketeers.me, a php consulting team from the East Coast, was running the show, putting their own signature onto the event. And with great success I might add. A well deserved applause to Eli White, Kevin Bruce, Sandy Smith, Oscar Merida and of course the Beth Tucker Long for their unlocked achievement running a great conference.

He talks about running the unconference for this year's event and one talk that resonated with a lot of people at the conference, Ed Finkler's "Open Sourcing Mental Illness". He also goes through some of the other regular sessions talks he found interesting covering things like security, refactoring, and dealing with distractions during work. He also mentions the hackathon and some of the good work that was done there.

In my experience the best php[tek] ever, and I'm really looking forward to the 2014 edition. If you don't believe me, have a look at the pictures taken at php[tek] 2013. They will tell the story.

I love PHP conferences. I attended a lot of PHP conferences when I was a brand new developer. Zendcon, OSCON, php[tek], Wordcamp Baltimore, DC PHP and others were my stomping grounds. I learned a lot, and the conferences I attended were on the whole useful, beneficial and wonderful experiences. But I also felt challenged by the fact that conferences don't offer much for bringing up new developers with concrete information and training. This isn't necessarily the fault of conferences: it's impossible to truly impart a useful skill into a developer with only a 45 minute talk.

He includes four ideas in the post and talks some about the role of training at the events:

• Are conferences even the right place for training?
• Creating Different Tracks of Different Lengths
• Including Hands-On Training During Tutorial Days
• Offer Learning-Focused Hackathons

He also notes that some of it is up to the developers to find a good fit for what they need and the skills they're looking to learn. There's other options out there besides just the usual conferences, too and, as Brandon states, "investing in your career is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself."

Even if you have no knowledge of any of Microsoft's PHP solutions you're more then happy to join us and see how you can build applications so they can be distributed with the Microsoft IIS infrastructures.

Whatever your reason, you can find out more about the conference and the hackathon over on the PHPBenelux website and pick up your tickets now (300 Euro for the full event, just 160 Euro for a partial ticket).

So I'm proud to say that at php|tek this year, we've managed to gather a bunch of these people to come to show what they're building at our third annual Hackathon. On Thursday night (May 26th), we'll have over a dozen projects represented by some of the best and brightest out there. Even better, since it's a Hackathon, you can't just passively watch and listen. We expect you to show up and try out some code and generally get your hands dirty.

There'll be several projects there for attendees to choose from including web2project, Joind.in, Spaz, Frapi, the Zend Framework and even a PHP testfest for helping test the PHP language itself. For more info on these and the full list of other projects that'll be there, check out this page on the php|tek conference site.

Last year's TestFest was a huge success. The worldwide initiatives by usergroups and individuals gave a nice addition to the code coverage for PHP itself. This year, the TestFest period has been extended to 3 months, starting the beginning of this month and ending end of june. But a nice bunch of European usergroups including the Dutch usergroup are combining TestFest on may 9th!

TestFest events are happening all over the world - you can see if there's one near you on this page of the PHP.net wiki. For those attending php|tek this year, there'll also be a TestFest going on during the Hackathon event (read our interview about the event here).

Q: Why a Hackathon?
The PHP community at large has seen a few recent events like Bughuntday and TestFest, but at the point where the idea came up to have a Hackathon, events like this had never part of a conference. This seems odd when you think about it, because conferences are a situation where a number of people interested in development are all in one physical location. While online collaboration is certainly possible it's not always as easy or fun as in-person real-time collaboration. And yet, events like these have occurred independently of conferences rather than in conjunction with them.

This will be the first year that an unconference event is included in the conference program for php|tek. I suppose my colleague who originated the Hackathon idea, Keith Casey, figured that firsts come better in pairs. Seriously, though, it gives this large number of aggregated developers a chance to make significant contributions to PHP projects that we all know and use.

Q: How has the interest level been?
The idea has had very positive reception. We've already gotten commitments from core developers of a number of major projects including PHP itself and a few well-known frameworks. It's commonplace at a conference for people to get into ad-hoc discussions with project developers and for patches to be written for issues or potential new features during those discussions. The Hackathon is an attempt to organize these occurrences so that many people are doing it at the same time and have an opportunity to coordinate and pool their efforts.

Q: Have any coding sprints been considered?
As a matter of fact, we've gotten a commitment from people involved in last year's TestFest event to organize another like it as part of the Hackathon. If you're unfamiliar with TestFest, it's a coordinated effort to improve the code coverage of PHP itself by writing tests in PHP. It's easy to get involved and people will be available at the Hackathon to bring you up to speed on what you need to know if you'd like to contribute. This is an excellent opportunity for developers to contribute to the stability and reliability of PHP, which has a widespread effect on all of us.

Q: Will the groups for each of the softwares be the ones to pick whats worked on or will people be free to hack away at any part?
While groups may guide those working, whether they do so will be their prerogative. Ultimately, it's your choice what you work on, and it doesn't have to be a project that someone else is representing. I myself plan to hack on Phergie, my PHP-based IRC bot. Bring your laptop, sit, hack, and have a good time with the rest of us. If everyone enjoys the event, I'll consider it a success and any contributions we make to PHP projects will be icing on the cake.

Q: So, what happens to the bugs they fix? Will they get pushed back into the project?
Ideally, yes. If not, they can be submitted as patches to project issue trackers, which makes them all the more likely to be accepted eventually. We're trying to get as many core project developers involved in the Hackathon as possible. At worst, they'll at least be aware of the patches that are submitted. At best, they can inspect them and push into project version control repositories soon after they're submitted at the Hackathon. So, if you know of a project whose core developers will be present at php|tek, you can help by encouraging them to attend the Hackathon!

Q: And the most important question - will food and beverage be provided?
The tentative plan is for the Hackathon to run from 4:30 to 10:30 on Thursday. Hors d'oeuvres will be served from 7:30 to 8:30, followed by drinks for the remaining time. While we'd certainly like for people to stay the entire time, there are a number of restaurants in the area where people can get dinner then come back for the rest of the event. In any case, we'll update the Hackathon page on the php|tek web site (http://tek.mtacon.com/c/s/hackathon) as more information becomes available.

You can find out more about this year's php|tek conference on its main site and more details on the Hackthon here.

February is usually when the many fun and interesting activities that surround our spring conference php|tek start taking place - and this year is no exception. In fact, this year that are more people working - hellbent might be a better word, given their enthusiasm - on making |tek a memorable occasion for PHP developers from all over the world to meet up, learn and network.

The three events/happenings he mentions are the keynote being given by Andrei Zmievski (Open Source Fellow at Digg), the webcast/unconference being organized by Keith Casey and the Hackathon being put together by Matthew Turland (both of Blue Parabola).

You can get more information on what sort of talks will be happening and how you can reserve your spot on the main conference website.

Here's a few more specifics:

• The newly announced keynote will be a talk from Andrei Zmievski (recently appointed Open Source Fellow at digg and will talk about PHP6
• The Hackathon has been officially announced in conjunction with the Unconference
• And, for those that thought they had missed out on the early-bird pricing for the event - listen up! They've extended the early-bird pricing out until February 28th!

You can get more information about the php|tek conference for 2009 (including registering to reserve your spot) on official conference website

Think you might like for a Hackathon to be included in the Unconference? (Or want to know more about what such an event would entail?)

If you'd like to get in on the discussion, there's already a Google group set up that you can join to keep up with the latest. The group just started up , so there's not a whole lot of content there yet so go over any voice your opinion on the matter. Oh, and if you're looking for a quick and easy URL that'll get you there, use http://tinyurl.com/tek09hackathon.