The good news was that Rasmus and Nikolay couldn't see any reasons why PHP was particularly challenging. What we saw were general challenges in scaling applications to large traffic volumes - and that's pretty much where the panel discussion went. Here's a few key points from the discussion.

Highlighted points included: removing bottlenecks to help performance (simple in theory, hard in practice), the fact that PHP should never be the bottleneck, the "odd direction" of HipHop, challenges/growing pains in moving from startup to a large web property. There was also a less technical discussion about "scaling teams" and finding the right (motivated) people to do the job.

Last week, there was the Symfony Live conference in Paris. The conference was surprisingly big, about 500 developers came together in the impressing building of Cité Universitaire Internationale. The main topic was of course the upcoming Symfony2 release. We had two days of talks and a hackday on Saturday, and lots of fun every night. The topics are on the conference website, some discussion and slides are on joind.in.

He mentions some of the "state of Symfony2" updates that were mentioned and some of the talks that were given by the Liip employees including ones on the Symfony2 CMF project, RabbitMQ and Symfony2, security and Javascript.

Approximately 10 days ago, I finished the 2010 CodeWorks Tour. This time around with 4 speakers hitting 5 cities, it was smaller, more compact, and generally a little more intimate of an experience. Due to the odd nature of this one, I'm going to skip my usual "Good, Bad, Ugly" conference review format and go straight to some highs & lows.

He breaks it up into a few different topics - the venues (naming Portland as the champ), the presentations he gave and how they progressed over the course of the tour, the attendees, user group involvement and, unfortunately, the TSA hassle they had to deal with.

By my standards, CodeWorks 2010 was a success. By having a smaller team than last year, it was simpler and easier, but more importantly, the single-track nature kept everything focused, moving, and made sure everyone could participate together.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend WordCamp NYC 2009. Overall, it was a blast but there are some specific sessions and people I'd like to point out as particular stand outs. [...] Overall, WordPress NYC 2009 was a great time. Jane Wells deserves lots of thanks for getting things organized and keeping things moving. These events wouldn't come together without dedicated and motivated people making them happen.

His "shoutouts" went to Raphael Mudge (After the Deadline), Brad Williams, Mark Jaquith, Aaron Brazell and Daryl Koopersmith.

Last week's PHP Brasil '08 conference was held at the "UNIFIEO" University in Osasco, a region of Sao Paulo. [...] The conference was organized under the leadership of Er Galvao Abbott with community input, and in conjunction with a logistics team from "Tempo Real Eventos". The conference was very interesting and successful.

He mentions the training sessions, talks and the exhibition hall that was "arranged around a basket ball court with a life-size PHP ElePHPant dominating one end". Lots of Oracle elePHPants were given away and the social events were enjoyed, accomidations were nice and plenty of networking was going on throughout the days.

• Lars Strojny
• Christian Weiske
• Florian Anderiasch
• and a post on the ThinkPHP blog

You can check out the conference homepage for more on what went on.

The conference was pretty small; about 80 people; in two small-ish conference rooms in the hotel. But everyone was great. Conferences are all about the people anyway. With the small crowd, it meant being able to spend time with a significant percentage of the people there. It was a mix of PHP thought leaders, everyday PHP programmers, and, since it was based in DC, a lot of folks focused on the unique industry that is DC - government.

He talks about some of the talks given - including Chris Shiflett's security talk and Eli White's look at high volume PHP & MySQL scaling techniques. He also mentions some of the "general chatter" that was happening around him. Check out the rest of the blog entry for more.

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 Naberezny'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

This week, there's talk of:

• the Zend_View_Pagination proposal (and download)
• some discussion on Localization
• a large discussion on Component Naming Conventions
• a new proposal for a Zend_Ecommerce module
• the suggestion for an "Announcements Only" list
• a proposal for a Zend_Graph module

And much, much more - it was a busy week on the mailing list, and you can check out Cal's summary or you can head over to the archives and check it out for yourself.