Rafael Dohms

That’s it, time running out and the sun comes out again for Day 4 of ZendCon.

This morning was diferent, more nervous, and that’s because the first session on the agenda, wasn’t a session.. it was an Exam. So i was a nervous wreck (as always before any test, its hardcoded in me) up until 9h when I sat down in the room, in front of the computer in the ZCE test room.

Almost 1 hour later, I sat there with a question on the screen “Clicking Yes will end this exam and give you a grade, do you wish to continue?”, well, i wasn’t sure, but i cliked yes anyway… and then… boom!

Grade: Pass

Yes, relief rushed all over me, and I was finally a Zend Certified Engineer.

From there i skipped to the PHP 5.3 session, having missed half of it, but was glad to find a panel discussion-like session discussing the features and opening the floor for questions, good to hear the new stuff from the guys who are actually doing it, so that was a plus. oh, and do note, “There is no goto”. Ok that’s an internal joke, but let’s say core developers added goto to PHP 5.3 .. but we should overlook it, just pretend its note there said Andi Gutmans.

Leaving that session i got more good news, Neil also passed the test, right after me. And off I was to “I need more servers” session by Maurice Kherlakian, who made a pass on many scaling strategies. Most were wll known, but an excelent comparison table for each step of the way.

And then off to the Hall… ZendCon was coming to an end. Closing keynote by the American Cancer Association who is also investing on PHP solutions and is reaching out to the community.

And that was it for ZendCon. The coolest event i have ever attended, good material for the office, certification, excelent business contacts, wonderful news for Brazil UGs, all in all this was an extremelly positive conference. Congratulations to all the Zend Team, and a special thanks to Cal Evans, for the elePHPant of course, but for giving me a few moments attention, also Zend’s CEO Harold and CMO Mark for the attention to the Brazilian market, 2009 will be a cool year!

See you all on the next ZendCon (i hope!). And wait for some more updates and details on each of the sessions!

So, Day 3 begins, sorry for the delay, but day 3’s night was spent with ZCE studying and Yahoo partying, so here we go.

The day was supposed to start with a Keynote on The Age of Literate Machines, but unfortunately Zak could not make it, and we watched a demonstration by the Magento Team. I t was interesting, but not exactly what the croud was looking for, but hey, the IRC channel is always a cool place o hang out during these talks.

Afterwards I went to Matthew’s talk on Webservices, which was unfortunately marred by notebook problems, but was a very interesting overview of Zend Framework’s pro and cons relating to the various webservices.

For a little break after this i went to a UnCon Session, on Zend_View and Zend_Layout, which was really good and helped Neil get a new view on how we could do ZF integration with Smarty, one of our problems back in the office, also got more feedback from other guys who have been through this.

Along came lunch, another excelent lunch provided by Zend, and afterwards a much awaited Keynote, the State of Ajax with Dion almaer and Ben Galbraith, unfortunately Dion could not be here, but Ben did a wonderful job and painted a cool picture of where the web is going heading, I always have fun at this session.

Next up came Pharscapes by Marcus Boerger, tellling us about .phar, a new extension that will be inplemented in the core, and let’s us do, jar-like files in PHP. The topic is interesting and the presentantion gave a little insight into it, but no wow yet, I’m still not sol on this one yet.

Next up, one of the sessions I was most interested in, Continuos Integretion, by Sebastian Bergmann. This was almost complimentary to the Test Driven Development talk, especially because it refered to the same team, but was a wonderful introduction to the power of PHPUnit + phpUnderControl with CruiseControl in the background, also helped me and Neil get answers to some of our PHPUnit questions and get some notes on recipe’s for the SWAT Team, real good stuff!!

From then I attended a UnCon Discussion Panel on PHP User Groups, hosted by Keith and Ben Ramsey, representing all 19 UG’s in Brazil. This was really good, Zend was present and we should have great news in the next few months.

That wraps up the Con. But after this we had some more exhibit hall swag goodness and Me and Neil got some Mock ZCE Exams done, and headed out to the Yahoo sponsored party!

Power was running low with my sore throat, so i could not blog, but hey.. it worked out.

Ok, here we go, end of day 2 and I got a horrible sore throat, and a headache.. but let me try to tell about my day.

First thing, at ZendCon when you pay for your registration, you get your money’s worth.. breakfast, lunch and dinner! Every conference should learn valuable lessons like ZendCon has.

The day kicked off with the Opening Keynote by Harold Goldberg, and I could not get the Steve Jobs at MacWorld image out of my head, but he was talking about PHP! So Zend’s CEO gave a great keynote showing PHP evolution to the Enterprise world, which was last year’s  Call for Action, so hey, hooray for us! So a few stats, clients, smart people dropping java, more jobs, and we started getting the Apple-style surprises like uncle Steve always does it.

First up, new Certifications! You can now be a Zend Framework Certified Engineer!, Second up Zend Studio 6.1 with ajax, dojo integration, eclipse 3.4 and visual query builder, IDE goodness! Third thing, Zend + Adobe! Yay!, here comes AMF support for Zend Framework and Zend Studio, Flex Builder merger!

Closing it up, this year’s Call for Action, let’s evangilize PHP, forget Why PHP, we know that, move on to When PHP? What PHP? How PHP? Where PHP?

After that i moved on to Jay Pipes Join-fu Session for some Karate style SQL queries. It was a cool insider’s view to MySQL’s internal optimizer, and i’ll blog some more about (and all talks) later on, no details today, sorry. But we did get a run down of good practices, tips and tricks and karate join-fu!

After that we were off to a trip in Ning-ville with David Sklar, who gave us an inside look at static and dynamic analysis they do over there. So this was an interesting session where you could learn some cool techniques to get info on your code, first off static analysis, which you do on your source code, with tokenizer, regular expressions and opcode dumping.

Then the Dynamic analysis took us through Xdebug, functions traces, truss and dtrace, checking out what happens when php functions are called, lookig at all the syscalls what happens behind the scenes.

So of to lunch, again given to us by Zend and its sponsors, but first a stop at the Exhibit Hall, where I got stuff from a whole bunch of exhibitors, and i’ll talk more about them later on this week.

After lunch i made a bad call.. and got into a Zend Plataform session that was intended for “decision takers” so I skipped to Elizabeth’s PECL Picks session… unfortunatley she was into speeding and running red lights.. so i just got like, 10 minutes of the session, well.. free tome to check out the exhibitors.

Next up was Robert van der Linde with an awsome PHP Secure Apps Developement Life-Cycle, which gave us some insight into security measures for your apps, and your office. So testing, OWASP, best practices like whitelisting and FI/EO all came up during the talk, and then the real killer app was PHPIDS, a Intrusion Detection System written in PHP and for PHP, must say this was cool, and will definately look into it.

Another break and here we go with Zend Studio Secrets, — ok, skip that one, too many keyboard shortcuts in 1 minute of session, next room, RickRolling with Brian DeShong and WUFRL and associated techs. Intersting stuff, cool video clip, but nothing too new, but cool set of extensions to handle mobile browsers.

And then, finally (i was getting tired you know?) Derick Rethan’s session on Test Driven Development. I was really into this, so this was a reat talk, Derick also does great sessions , so it was best of both worlds. So why TDD? a great bunch of tools, like phpUnderControl, PHPUnit and a inside look into how ezComponents does actual TDD adapted for their reality. A great session, and I say, i’m should really get into TDD, and take the whole team with.

From there.. dinner, well booze, food and shirts! So cool, answer a Zend crossword puzzle, and there you go… cool shirt! That lasted some hours and my throat just could not take anymore, so here i am, blogging and drinking cough syrup.

Time for some shut-eye and Day 3 is upon us.!

So its end of Day One here at ZendCon, let's do a quick re-cap.

So i met up with my co-worker, another SWAT member Neil Broers, and we got going to the conference center across the street. We went through registration, got our cool ZendCon Bags and all the cool papers inside there. It was almost time for our first tutorial, Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course, so we headed up to the right room to get our seats.

This crash course was given by Christian Wenz, a german php developer, author of a great many books and a great contributor to the ZCE Exam, so he has really good info on all the details. This is a 18h course given by Zend, but it was compressed into just over 5 hours for the ZendCon atendees. So that cause a little rush in some topics, but overall it was a great talk.

What Wenz did for the session is to just go through all topics showing some of the trick questions we should expect in the exam as well as give us an overall view of the whole exam, and such. This was really great, during the morning we focused on some 4 of the 12 topics, especially the PHP Basics topic, and we could clearly see that the test was all about little missing pieces and details that changes the whole output, which is something i actually don't like about the certification.

So during the coffee break I got into a quick conversation with Derick Rethans and Neil, and Derick was telling us about working with dBus, so that he could dialup his phone using PHP, yeah, that cool and insane at the same time, but hay... i got PHP to turno on my lights didn't I?

Lunch was really good, cheers to Cal Evans for the great event organization, we had a choice of Turkey and Rosbeef sandwiches with brownies, ok, I'm off PHP, but hey, it was awesome! After lunch i introduced Neil some PHP celebs and met some of them myself.

We had a chance to meet Matthew Turland, which i had been chatting with already, who is author of Phergie a PHP IRC bot, Davey Shafik co-author of the ZCE Guide and Original creator of Phar, Elizabeth Smith, one of PHP Women's key figures, Derick Rethans, all around core developer and Xdebug author, Cal Evans, Zend go to guy and indenti.ca's creator, and Wez Furlong, well you know Wez right? Core developer and all around PHP Celeb. Oh and i also met Lorna Jane from IBuildings, but just briefly.

So we had a great chat before sessions started up again, and it was actually good that at some point we got off PHP and started geek-chatting, that was really fun.

The afternoon was part 2 of the crash course and followed the same line. and afterwards I got a big surprise! I'm the newest ElePHPant Herder in SF. I got my elePHPant plush toy, from ... yeah I think I can't say who gave me it until after the conf.. or he'll have no life at all. But he knows who he is, THANKS DUDE!

But talking about the session, let me share of the topics we heard there.

Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course

Wenz gave us some starting tips, and i wrote down some extra stuff in each section, so let's get at it.

First of all, you need to have some knowledge of rare attributes and edge cases for the main functions, that helps alot. Your answers should be lowercase with the "()" at the end, well, its just the best policy.

PHP Basics. Watch out for indentation trick questions with HereDoc and always, always pay attention to number representations, like

We chatted quite a bit over string to int, to float and other conversions and we test has a whole bunch of trick questions here. Something else to note is the boolean conversion and the 4 exceptions that result in false ("0", 0, "" and NULL).

Words like always and never need to be closely looked at and are probably wrong, but this is no just PHP exams, right? We also did some questions on bitwise operators, which you don't need to be an expert at, but should know about. As well as knowing the on the ASCII Table, that uppercase letters have lower values then lowercase, since that will matter in string comparison questions.

Functions. watch out for argument handling, and writing functions with dynamic parameters, using the get parameter functions, also, and I had never actually realized this, but this code works:

OOP. Yeah.. not much here... I mean, if you develop PHP in OO you are well versed for this, but do take a look at SPL and its various aspects.

Strings. Functions, functions and functions... check them out, learn about case sensitive and insentive and try to get the names right.

RegExp. Don't need to be a wiz, but be sure to know the basics and be able to break down the PCRE patterns, and identify them in questions

That's about it, we had more topics but the follow the same line and I actually didn't note anything new that i can popup here.

So, here we go, time to sleep and get ready for Day 2, see you all tomorrow.

Less then 5 days to go to ZendCon.

This year, I'll be there to check out some of the best PHP Talks out there, from the "bigshots" of PHP. Its the first international conference I'll be attending, and I'm really looking forward to it.

So of course, if you are going to ZendCon, by now you have already reserved your hotel, bought your plane tickets (if you need them), but what else? Whatelse should you to while the conference doesn't start? Let me suggest some things:

1. Make your schedule: The ZendCon site has a neat feature, allowing you to flag the sessions you want to watch. So my suggestion is. go there.. go through all and flag everything you find interesting. Then, on a separate day go back and check which choices clash, or will happen at the same time. Choose between them, or at least reduce your choices, got 3? drop one.. and so on until conference day, when you got a solid list.
2. Make a list: Not just any list, a people list. A conference usually offers on thing more valuable than any other, networking. So make a list of the people who will be there, who they are, how they contribute to PHP, which sessions they will speak at. When you meet them at the conference, you will be ready to identify and chat with them.
3. Make business cards! Yeah... they are a must, mine are late, its a shame, let's hope i have them by flight time.
4. Join us in #zendcon on irc.freenode.net. Another great thing to do is chat with some of the attendees at the IRC channel, so you can check when everyone is getting there, who's at you hotel, and just get to know everyone.
5. Check out the Wiki! The ZendCon Wiki has some interesting pages, put you name on the list of attendees, or check out the meetups list.

That's a small list of things you should be doing before the Conference. I'm already there, you can find me in IRC or Twitter, just look for rdohms.

See you all at ZendCon.