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.

We have a big announcement this year. Because we had over 400 amazing talks submitted to us, and we just couldn't bear to decline that many of them. We are expanding the tek13 conference format to include 4 concurrent tracks this year!

Sessions at this year's event include:

• "Zend Framework 2 Tutorial" - Rob Allen
• "Git Makes Me Angry Inside" - Emma Jane Hogbin
• "PHP and Node.js Together" - Chris Tankersley
• "Performance Perpetrators: Profiling for Professionals" - Derick Rethans
• "Database Version Control without Pain?" - Harrie Verveer
• "Building Testable Applications" - Chris Hartjes

Their Early Bird pricing for this year ends at the end of this month, so if you want the discounted price, be sure to register early!