Ben congratulates Stefan for the nomination, for making the list when others in the PHP community didn't.

Stas, on the other hand, disagrees a bit with some of the comments made by the reporter that wrote up Stefan's piece:

I do not see how reporting a bunch of vulnerabilities (most of them fixed by the time of publication - for which thanks to Stefan Esser as the responsible reporter) is "thoroughly exposing the insecure nature of PHP". Bugs and bug reports - including ones that may affect security in one way or another - are nothing but commonplace in both open-source and non-open-source software worlds.

You can check out the full list for yourself on the eWeek site.

Chicago Illinois is the third largest city in the United States. It's also very different in personality and structure than other large US cities, taking on the rather laid back flavor that defines the Midwest, but also has the dubious distinction of being the "travel hub" of the United States. The size and travel possibilities made it an ideal location for the php|tek conference in May, hosted by php|architect.

She talks about the speakers, the location, people she met, keynotes (Rasmus and Marco Tabini) and tons of other great info. Check out the full post for the complete story.

From the official press release:

Zend Technologies, Inc., The PHP Company, today announced that IDG's Computerworld, the premier source of IT industry news and analysis, selected Andi Gutmans, co-CTO and co-founder of Zend, as one of its "40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40." Gutmans was selected for the award by a panel of Computerworld editors for his pioneering work with PHP 3, continued work with PHP 4 and 5, advancement of business critical rich internet applications, further development of PHP and Java integration, and, most recently, significant contributions to the open source collaboration project Zend Framework.

You can read more about Andi and the other nominees over in the ComputerWorld article highlighting him and the 39 other honorees.

As I write this, it's Sunday. I'm sitting here in the lobby of the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. [...] Now that I've had a chance to relax and gather my thoughts, let's glance back over the shoulder before packing up for the next conference.

For each day, he gives the highlights, both of the people he met and of the talks/tutorials attended. There's even a few special announcements included that happened during the week - like about the new ZendBox the company will be offering. After-hours activities were mentioned as well, including the "Pirate Party" IBM threw the last night of the conference.

Cal has also been nice enough to post the full listing of the cards over on his Flickr account. The cards include:

The four queens - Sara Golemon, Laura Thomson, Dhwani Vahia, and Joyce Park
• The two jokers - Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski
• The four kings - Rasmus Lerdorf, Wez Furlong, Marcus Boerger, and Rob Richards
• The aces - Zend Products: the Framework, Platform, the Certification, and Zend Studio

This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I'm sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.

Talks hhe mentions were Mike Naberenzy's look at Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Eli White's High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques talk. He also mentions meeting David Recordon from VeriSign and some work that Damien Seguy on tracking statistics on open phpinfo pages (about half still have register globals on!).

I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.

Included in the things he mentions are:

• The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann)
• The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing")
• His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone
• The PHP 5 Certification
• and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk

One of the great things about OSCON is how it brings people together, and this year's conference was no different. I had the privilege of meeting a number of people for the first time.

People on his list include Cal Evans, Andrew van der Stock, Kevin Yank, Jeremy Johnstone, and Ed Finkler. He also mentions a "cool idea" from Zak Greant - the use of a bug/issue tracker to deal with community issues.

Chris also briefly mentions the "PHP trading card game", the PHP Security Hoedown, and the OmniIT book signing.

Cal Evans of Zend's DevZone accidentally revealed his php community who's who flash cards (so that he can put faces to names at the conference)--and it looks just like a trading card game.

Luckily for you, Terry Chay was on hand to document them. You can see more of these on Terry's flickr stream.

Wez comments that there also seemed to be problem with the run (more than one Zak?).

If you have never been to a PHP Conference, you owe it to yourself to make 2006 a year to attend one. There are of course the obvious benefits of attending the presentations and being able to see these presentations first hand as well as being able to interact with the presenters, ask questions, etc.

A more subtle benefit is the networking which happens at these conferences. People whom you recognize from email addresses on mailing lists, pseudonyms on forums or names on the covers of PHP books are actually living breathing people (and usually fine, upstanding people at that). PHP conferences are a great opportunity to interact with both the presenters, conference organizers and the other attendees, who likely share many common interests with you, chiefly a passion for PHP and web development.

He talks about two conferences that are coming up pretty soon, one on either side of the world. In the U.S., there's php|tek put on by phparch.com, and over in the UK, there's the new PHP UK 2006 conference being held in London...]]> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:03:25 -0600