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.

So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. [...] This wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.

Presentations chosen and made at this year's unconference included:

• a talk about the PHPRC (PHP Content Repository)
• "Clean Puppet"
• Behavior Driven Development
• Agile documentation
• Hood.ie
• Symfony2 REST API
• NoSQL is Not the Answer

If you're interesting to see what the event was like, check out some of the photos they've posted to their site.

As a native geordie I was pleased to have a chance to attend a PHP conference in the north east. Even after living in Manchester for nearly a decade now, Newcastle still feels like home. [...] I arrived in plenty of time to enjoy the complimentary bacon sandwich and coffee on offer before finding some faces I recognised and settling in to the Electra Room where the main track was due to start, with Inviqa's very own Rowan Merewood taking to the stage to deliver the opening keynote.

He goes through each of the talks he attended (including the keynote) and gives an overview of their content:

• Building Better Developers (Rowan Merewood)
• API Driven Development: Eating Your Own Dog Food (Alex Bilbie)
• Measuring and Logging Everything in Real Time (Bastian Hofmann)
• Modernisation of legacy PHP applications using Symfony2 (Fabrice Bernhard)
• Introduction to Symfony CMF (Likas Kahwe Smith)
• Keeping The Cloud In Check (Thijs Feryn)

I took something from every talk and I don't really have a bad word to say about any of it. I hope this does not end up as the only PHPNE, it is only a shame that next year a new venue will likely need to be found as I expect demand for tickets will be high.

This year the low-to-middle budget CodeIgniter Conference was held in San Francisco in a brilliant co-working space called Citizen Space. I didn't know at the time but this space is actually a partner of New Work City, the venue for CICON2011, so it was great to "keep it in the family".

He goes on to talk about some of the speakers that were at the even and gives summaries of the sessions as they were given. Topics included Paas (PagodaBox, specifically), Chef, Varnish, RESTful APIs and productivity with the CI framework. If you weren't able to attend, you can find slides and some videos of the event posted on its Lanyrd page.

• High Performance PHP
• Gamestorming Your Product with Service Design
• ERD, Flowcharts and Other Documentation
• Creating an Epic RESTful API and Conquering the World
• How to Motivate Your Developers

This is just a small sampling of the sessions, so head over to the conference's page and get the full list! Congrats to the Northeast PHP organizers for not only having a great first year but for selling out the event!

Last week I returned from Verona, Italy where I spent a full week with some of the best Javascript and PHP developers out there. I've been wanting to go to phpDay for a number of years so when I was invited to present a talk about Symfony2 and MongoDB, there were no more excuses, I had to be there!

Pablo talks about the sessions he attended (at both JsDay and phpDay) including Zeev Suraski's (Zend) keynote, a talk from Lorenzo Alberton about "Taming the Twitter Firehose" and his own presentation about MongoDB and Symfony2. He also mentions the second day's keynote from Rasmus Lerdorf and a workshop about building PHP extensions.

Whisky Web is a brand new, fresh conference and the 2012 edition was the inaugural event, with hopefully many more to follow. This event has some familiar names from the PHP community behind it, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas and his helpers Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis.

He talks about several of the sessions including the keynotes from Josh Holmes and David Zuelke and other sessions covering things like estimation, Node.js, the rush into new technologies, testing legacy code and running applications in "the cloud".

I started writing a Zendcon recap post as soon as I got back. And then mis-timed a couple projects. Note to freelancers, make sure your new gig starts AFTER your old gig is over. Or you'll be working an insane schedule. Hence the lateness... First the good part. What made Zendcon special.

He notes that it was a great opportunity to meet people "in real life" that he'd only spoken with online and the overall wonderful experience it was. He mentions some specific people in the PHP community including Juozas Kaziukenas, Daniel Cousineau, some impromptu singing of Queen songs and many more (too many to name here). He also mentions some of the sessions attended including the tutorial on Zend Framework and an uncon talk from Ilia Alshanetsky about optimization.

I had a great time at CodeWorks 2011 in Raleigh this week, put on by the great folks at php|architect. Here is a rundown of the presentations, with some of my thoughts. [...] To all the conference speakers, organizers and attendees, I want to say thank you for a fun and educational experience.

The sessions for this stop on the tour were:

• "CI:IRL" by Beth Tucker Long
• "How Beer Made Me a Better Developer" by Jason Austin
• "What's new in PHP 5.4" by Cal Evans
• "Refactoring and Other Small Animals" by Marco Tabini
• "jQuery Mobile and Phonegap" by Terry Ryan
• "REST Best Practices" by Keith Casey

In his post Joshua talks about the conference in general - the quality of the talks he went to and the community he experienced while there. He also mentions his presentation, "Puppet for Dummies" and some sessions from the Unconference.

Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend adds his perspective and mentions some of the new technologies that were introduced during the event including their PHPCloud platform and the Zend Application Fabric.