SunshinePHP Developer Conference is proud to announce the opening keynote speaker Rasmus Lerdorf. In February 2013 when it is cold in most places around the world, it is still sunny and beautiful in Florida. So come down to Miami for a few days and enjoy sun, community, and learn all in one great conference.

Tickets for the event are already on sale with an Early Bird price (pre-November 30th) of $159.95 USD. If you're more inclined towards speaking at the event, their Call for Papers is only open until December 1st so hurry and get those submission in!

There's five sessions they'll be sharing via the stream starting today and running through the 25th:

• Opening Keynote - Andi Gutmans (Zend)
• Open Source Cloud Technologies - Jimmy Guerrero (Red Hat, Inc.), Adrian Otto (Rackspace) and Peder Ulander (Citrix Systems)
• The Media Industry and Moving to PHP - Raghu Bala (Source Interlink), Brent Pearson (UBM Technology)
• PHP in the Cloud: Choice, Scale, Code, Simplify - Simone Brunozz (Amazon Web Services)
• Zend Framework 2 - Practical Experience from the Trenches - Matthew Weier O`Phinney (Zend Technologies), Shawn Stratton (Discovery Communications, Inc.), Evan Coury (SouthwestMedical.com) and Mike Willbanks (CaringBridge)

The Opening Keynote starts at 8:30am PDT, so keep your eyes here for that broadcast.

Computer programs are the most complicated things that humans make. They must be perfect, which is hard for us because we are not perfect. Programming is thought to be a "head" activity, but there is a lot of "gut" involved. [...] The systems in our brains that make us vulnerable to advertising and propaganda also influence our programming styles. This talk looks systematically at the development of a programming style that specifically improves the reliability of programs. The examples are given in JavaScript, a language with an uncommonly large number of bad parts, but the principles are applicable to all languages.

You can listen to this episode either using the in-page player, downloading the (rather large) mp3 or just subscribe to their feed to get the latest.

For the past 10 years, the LAMP stack has laid waste to proprietary software stacks. Yes, Microsoft has held onto gargantuan profits, but LAMP has become the foundation for leading web services, whether Google or Facebook or [Insert Big Web Brand Here]. LAMP is the future. Or was. That is, until cloud killed it, as Eucalyptus CEO (and former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos posits in a great keynote from the Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

In the keynote he pointed out that it's becoming less about the whole setup and more about combining technologies to get the results you need - less "stack" and more "linked technology" (and not always the same tech for every node). He pointed to the Amazon AWS service as a prime example of a platform that allows endless flexibility as to what software can be installed and how it can be used, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

APIs are commonly an afterthought, like a hot tub awkwardly attached to a house  - a shoehorned approach that produces a suboptimal app with scarce support that lacks documentation. In effect, APIs are the ugly stepchild of the Web.

He talks about why APIs are commonly an afterthought and some suggestions on how you can change that in your current and future applications. You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. You can also see the slides over on Slideshare.

We believe the schedule already has a lot to offer the way it is, but we still had one annoying "to be announced" slot on the Friday morning: the opening keynote! With only three weeks to go we are proud to announce that the DPC will be kicked off by one of the most talented speakers out there: Aral Balkan!

He'll talk about making "beautiful, delightful and fun things" as a part of the experience your user has with your applications. If you haven't gotten your tickets yet, be sure to grab them now. There's only three weeks left until the event! Full tickets cost 695 Euro and the half-tickets (just conference day or just tutorial day) are 375 Euro.

The wonderful PHP Northwest 2010 conference took place last weekend in Manchester, UK, and our Marco Tabini was present to keynote Lorna Jane Mitchell's keynote "Teach a man to fish." Here's the transcript from the event (powered by Blue Parabola's upcoming live-blogging system Broadr).

You can also find more about the session on it's Joind.in page (including a link to her slides.

ZendCon is now only two weeks away, and we've been hard at work in preparing for it. We've got a number of things in the works that we hope you are going to really enjoy!

Updates include new developments on the Unconference sesions, the creation of two new types of tickets - a First Day pass for $299 and a pass for just the UnCon/Expo Hall and opening Keynote. More information can be found on the registration website. There have also been two new keynote speakers added to the schedule - Andi Gutmans speaking on "PHP at the Heart of Mainstream IT" and Scott Baker's talk "A Series of Fortunate Events".

ZendCon 2009 is less than 2 months away, and preparations are moving along swiftly! [...] The speaker list is jam packed with well known names in the industry, currently sitting at 45 speakers, and a few more to be added in the coming weeks.

This year's conference will feature a keynote given by Kirrily Robert of Metaweb Technologies titled "Standing out in the Crowd" and a new session has been added - a framework shootout with a panel of representatives for the Zend Framework, CakePHP, Symfony, Agavi and CodeIgniter frameworks.

The Call for Papers for the International PHP Conference 2009 - Spring Edition has just opened! For more details, click here. The conference will take place on May 25th, 26th and 27th in Germany's capital city. See you in Berlin!

The deadline for putting your paper/suggestion in is coming up soon - February 20th, 2009. The two suggested talk times are 45 minutes (ketnote) and 60 minutes (regular session). There will also be 6 different 90 minute workshops.