Great news, we've selected the first speakers for Symfony Live Portland! We received a lot of great talks proposals (around 150, how amazing!) and we had a real, real hard time choosing between all of them.

Their list of speakers for this year's event will include:

• Michael Dowling
• Jeremy Lindblom
• Benjamin Eberlei
• Taylor Otwell
• David Zuelke
• Anthony Ferrara

There'll also be workshop session (one and two day) as well as time set aside for lightening talks. You can pick up your tickets here or just find out more information about the event from the main conference site.

The event will have a wide range of topics covered including:

• Cryptography for the Average Developer
• Continuous Integration in Real Life
• Quickly Building and Deploying PHP Applications in the Cloud
• Symfony2 + EmberJS for fun and profit
• Introducing Tests in Legacy PHP Applications
• Dependency Management with Composer
• From POX to HATEOAS, Our Companies Journey to Build a Hypermedia API

Tickets are already on sale for the event - about $220 USD for the full event, $160 for a student pass.

In this edition I talked with Rob Allen who is the main author of the famous PHP book "Zend Framework in Action". He is very passionate about the whole Zend stuffs: he's a contributor to the Zend_Config component in Zend Framework 1, he's a member of the Zend Framework Education Advisory Board, he keeps on with his contributions with the new Zend Framework 2 and he rambles a lot about QUALITY Zend Framework tutorials on his blog. Rob is fond of writing; his latest PHP-Advent article is "Better Than the Rest" and is also a regular conference speaker, speaking at the likes of ZendCon, PHP North West, PHP|Tek and a whole lots of places.

In the interview Rob answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• His advice to beginning PHP developers and ones looking to improve themselves
• Who he works (IDE, debugging, testing)
• Some recommended resources to learning and keeping up to date
• and some of his thoughts about conferences

We are firm believers that the PHP community is second to none. We also believe that Toronto has an awesome PHP community and deserves an equally awesome conference. Those beliefs are what inspired us to create True North PHP, a conference designed to showcase Toronto's talent and give back to the community that has given us so much.

If you're interested in speaking, you can find out more and submit your topics or, if you're just interested in attending, you can already pick up your Early Bird tickets.

I've recently been thinking that I should also do a better job of linking through to the various talks I'm giving/have given - and at around the same time I was contacted by the good folk at mojoLive about integrating against joind.in. To cut a long story short, the joind.in API now has the functionality for users to retrieve their list of talks!

Her example just uses a file_get_contents to pull the data from the remote URL in a JSON format. You don't need to be logged in to get to the talk information, though, so you won't need to bother with OAuth for this one. A snippet to loop through the results is also included.

This is the ninth 'social' interview in a series with the phpDay 2012 speakers: it's 'social' because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook. We are happy to introduce you Giorgio Sironi, a freelance PHP developer and PHPUnit_Selenium mantainer.

The questions cover a wide range of topics including:

• His thoughts about functional programming
• What he thinks of traits in PHP 5.4
• Which open source projects he follows the most
• What features he'd like to see in future versions of PHP

You can read the full interview here. You can also find out more about this year's conference (and get your tickets - hurry! it's next week!) on the main conference site.

• The MicroPHP Manifesto (Ed Finkler)
• Get Some Rest: Best RESTful API Practices (Lorna Mitchell)
• Daemonizing PHP (Andy Blyler)
• A Stitch In Time Saves Nine: Solving the N+1 Problem (Paul Jones)
• Social Commerce with magento and Open Graph (John Jawed)

There's lots more on the list too, so check out the full list for the PHP track at this year's event! OSCON is being held July 16-20th in Portland, Oregon. For more information on tickets see this page on the conference site.

This is the second 'social' interview in a series with the phpDay 2012 speakers: it's 'social' because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook. We are happy to introduce you Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop), co-founder of PHPBenelux, now active in the PFZ.nl events team , symfony community manager. He will give a session at phpDay called "A Practical Look At Symfony2" Saturday May 19th at 12 am on track 1.

They talk about Stefan's framework choice process, his thoughts on functional programming, what he thinks of traits in PHP 5.4 and what Open Source projects he's following the closest.

You can find out more about Stefan's session and the conference at http://2012.phpday.it.

We are very happy to announce the first confirmed speakers for the jsDay and phpDay 2012!

jsDay: Mark Boas (jPlayer/Happyworm), Greg Schechter (YouTube),Christopher Rhodes (Google) and Brandon Keepers (GitHub) , the full list here.

phpDay: Rasmus Lerdorf (Php creator), Zeev Suraski (CTO at Zend, Co-architect of PHP), Lorna Jane Mitchell (PhpWomen) and David Coallier (Orchestra CTO) and many other, the full talk list here.

Their Early Bird tickets are on sale until April 1st for both of these two-day events, so be sure you pick up your tickets now before this great discount expires! (jsDay tickets, phpDay tickets)

We are happy and proud to announce the speaker line-up for the 2012 edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. We already released our tutorials on November 16th, but this is the real deal. Speaker bio's, talk abstracts and schedule will be added later. Please note that this list is subject to change.

Sessions for this year's event include:

• Tobias Schlitt: Writing testable code
• Sebastian Marek: Magic Behind the Numbers - Software Metrics In Practice
• Nick Belhomme: PHP traits, treat or threat?
• Jordi Boggiano: Redis - Your advanced in-memory key-value store
• Stephan Hochdörfer: The state of DI in PHP
• Craig Kitterman: Enterprise Class Cloud for the Average Joe

Tickets are still at their Early Bird prices (but only until December 16th!) and you can get a pass for both the tutorial day and main conference day for just 260 Euro. If you just want to attend the conference, that ticket is only 135 Euro. You can order them here. If you want to attend one of the tutorials, you'll need to specify that by ordering the related ticket.