For those that will be attending the upcoming ZendCon Europe the Zend blog has announced the first ever ZendCon hackathon happening the night of the first day of the conference (Monday the 18th) starting at 7pm.

This special event reserved for ZendCon Europe attendees will stretch your coding limits to the extreme in a friendly competition. Join us on Monday night (room TBA) at 7:00PM for the hackathon kick-off. The rules will be announced then, and the hackathon will run throughout the event until Wednesday. Prizes include the highly coveted big green elePHPant, a 1 year subscription to GitHub, and certification vouchers for the fresh new PHP and ZF2 certification exams!

More information about the event will be shared at the actual conference, but if you're attending but sure you check out this fun event. Hackthons are a fun way to get people together, group up to write new and interesting applications...oh, and the prizes are nice too!

Davey Shafik has a new post about doing the closing keynote at this year's ZendCon Europe conference (happening November 18th through 20th in Paris, France).

In a little under three weeks I will be giving the closing keynote at ZendCon Europe. This will my first keynote and I’m excited to be talking about The Evolution of DevOps.

His talk will cover how the DevOps role has come into its own over the past few years and what kinds of changes to expect, as a developer, in the upcoming years. If you'd like to hear this and lots of other great talks, there's still time to pick up your tickets for either just the conference or for both the conference and tutorials. You can even opt to take the Zend certification while you're at the event.