Rafael Dohms

This year I was abel to attended the 2009 php|tek conference in Chicago. This conference is hosted by MTACon, the company behind php|architect magazine, one of the most influent PHP publications in the world. php|tek is a unique event in its overall “feel” and purpose – for those that read my post on ZendCon’08 you may be able to pickup this difference yourselves. Tek is a community oriented event, as opposed to ZendCon which is much more aimed at companies. Is this good you ask? Yes, its perfect, it in no way falls short of the content in ZendCon, but on the plus side it gives one many more opportunities to mingle and meet the central PHP Core Developer Team, and most importantly, it inspires attendees to work with and give back to PHP.

Same as last year, the conference was held in Chicago, IL in the Unites States at the Sheraton Hotel, a wonderful venue that helps keep everyone close by during the conference and during “off-time”. The conference ran for three days plus a tutorial day – from May 19th to May 22nd. The day before the start one could already see many of the most well known PHP developers arriving – it appeared that the Core team was arriving early to host a PHP Dev meeting held at Microsoft. And the topic of the conference .. ? PHP 5.3.

The sessions were great, and tutorials day featured particularly interesting sessions, of which I attended a security talk to complement my PHP Security skills,as well as a Code Review Session. This session, held by Sebastian Bergamann, Stefan Priebsch and Arne Blankerts was extremely interesting, we dove deep into the code of some major frameworks and apps, like Magento, Wordpress, Habari and found some incredible (not in a good sense) pieces of code. This talk showed me a different side of things especially for certain areas of coding where I can certainly do better. It also gave me a new perspective on code reviews, which have today a much bigger importance then before.

The rest of the sessions during the event were really good, some were inspiring (Security Centered Design), some made you wish PHP 5.3 was out (PHP 5.3 – Hot or not?), some made incredible associations to drive home the importance of a good development environment (The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development), some showcased the more obscure but very useful parts of PHP (SPL to the Rescue), some even tried to point you in a good direction (Untestable Code). There really were sessions for every kind of developer, from the “regular joe” to the php expert – at times I wished I had the method __clone implemented on myself, so I could get to all sessions. Also, alongside the event we had great UnCon Sessions and an Hackathon organized and led on by the community, with some simple but great sessions.

This leads me to the biggest feature of php|tek, and one most commonly overlooked by developers and managers alike, namely the community. This was by far the biggest difference from ZendCon, a total focus on the community and hence, a focus on geting everyone active. The PHP comunity has been in focus during the last few months. Since the news of PHP 5.3 was released we have seen an increase in activity inside the PHP community: BugHuntDays, TestFest09, documentation, patches, you name it the community has done it this year. User Groups keep growing and popping up everywhere. Just in Brazil we have had at least 5 groups started since last year. The conference fosters the

The recipe for success in this sense is not clear, was it the community oriented sessions (A guide to using and understanding the community, User Group Meetup)? The after-hour programming (PechaKucha night, Retro Gaming Night, Hackathon)? Maybe it was the breakfasts and lunches where you shared tables with all the active members of the community? The discussions around a cup of wine? I’m guessing it was a combination of all this, the sheer exposion to all this is enough to get you into the “giving back” mood. The ingredients are pretty simple, knowing where you can help, who to ask, where to read about it and a touch of “karma”. Many moments at tek were based on this, the interaction with great names of the community and a clear picture of what PHP needs. The whole experience shows you clearly that not Zend, ibuildings, IBM or Microsoft are in the control of PHP, we are, the community has grown.

PHPdeveloper.org has talked about this and I can see it myself, PHP has matured, coming out of its teenage years of rebelty and strange changes, and moving now to its mature Adult years. But not only the language, the whole of the PHP Community has tagged along, the core developers show more leadership, the community no longer takes a step back, it now steps forward, opinating, working, committing, participating.. no longer a bystander. During the closing notes the crowd was asked to stand up, not all at once, but in an order of “community activity”, it was amazing to see how many people were standing up in the end, from Core developers, extension developers, translators, documentators, testers, UG leaders to the PHP teacher at his company’s office we had almost a full room standing, leaving maybe 10~15% of people that are not active present in the event.

This is the message that Tek brings with it, the maturity of a language we know for so long, which fits right into ZendCon’s message from last year, “Why not PHP?”. Another indication that community was in focus was that some session focused on making the developers life easier, with frameworks, version control techniques and so many orders. Different from other times, sessions did note revolve around asking if a framework is enterprise-ready, they revolved around comparing various frameworks, deemed enterprise-ready, and how you should choose your framework. One of the features displayed for each framework was the community behind it, showing us once more that the community does make a difference and not only for PHP but for all the pieces we use on a daily basis.

If tek leaves me with a message I can take back to fellow developers and UG members it is: “Step up, contribute to PHP, help out with what you can, any little thing you do will come back around to you, writing tests will make for a better 5.3 release, and that will surely make life easier for you, it does not take too much, even small things like writing documentation, just get active, wear you PHP shirt and go for it.”

As for the managers, deccision makers and leaders, i leave you with this message: “Believe in PHP, invest in the community and in your employees, growing the language will grow your business, giving back to PHP will eventually give back to you. Promote that message in your office, employees who invest in PHP gain more knowledge about it, giving your solution more quality.”

(most of the talks mentioned here and most of the ones presented at php|tek09, can be found on slideshare)

First published at: http://www.mihswat.com/2009/05/31/phptek-2009/

And so comes the final day of the 2009 php|tek conference.

And it starts just as usual with breakfast with PHP Peeps and off to see Sean Coates’ session on Tokens over RegExps. Which was a very interesting session showing diferent techniques to some usual problems we handle with regular expressions, and showing great stuff for handling PHP source code analysis, cool stuff. Following that it was a quick hop and Ben Ramsey was showing us the internals of the HTTP protocol. People should really know more about it and look more carefully at it, many of us misuse its codes and methods. I was also lucky and won a elePHPant at the end of the session by answering a question on the “100 Continue” status code.

Finally we got to the ending keynote, first listening to Marco and his amazing plans for Code Works, that will replace php|works and will travel through 7 cities in the US during a 2 week period, awesome time to life in the US. Following Marco Terry Chay took the stage, everyone was ready with their f-bomb counters up and waiting to see how Terry could blow us all away… and blow us away he did. Relating Chinese Proverbs (sort of) to modern culture and the future of PHP, Terry led us to think closely of the current crisis and how PHP can com through for us.

Now we had time for some lunch and i joined the great company of Cal Evans, Ligaya, Travis Swicegood, Clark Everetts, Frozen, well you get the picture, we had a great lunch going from politics to IDE, to OS wars.. lots of fun.

After lunch i grabbed a bit of all the unconf talks, like Skoop and Kerry, his myth-busting partner. But the highlight was getting in some great covnersations with everyone before leaving, great to see everyone’s interest in Brazil and our growing community (www.php.org.br). So it ended, got back to the room packed and moved bak to O’Hare, where i met Spoons and Eli White before catching my flight.

Overall result? Awesome conference, great for getting in touch with the PHP people and to find out how to give back to the community, hanging out with anyone of these guys can inspire you to be so much more than you are and givin back to the PHP community, the whole event was one big reunion of all diferent ways you can do it. It was an honor and pleasure to meet all of you, or see the ones I had already met again, each one of you has inspired me in a diferent way or given me an ideia or two, and i will be bogging about this later on.

Till next time! Tek-on!

The beeping alarm begun another exciting day at php|tek09.

My usual breakfast buddies were around once again for a great meal to start it out right. The first session was High performance APC with Brian Shire from Facebook, and it was really interesting to see the APC improvements and what is in their roadmap, influenced by Facebook and their needs, working as a boost for APC development, defintively gonna kick our testing server into apc mode to run some tests. Parallel to this session Sara Golemon gave a PHP 5.3 session.. and from what i hear, those slides are golden! go find them! (i’ll post a link if i find them myself)

Next up Derick gave us a lesson on the K.I.S.S principle giving us tips on making the user’s life easy and getting sites done right. Leading up to a session on good OOP practices by Stefan Priebsch that got everyone think of objects and more objectsm driving the point of performance X maintanability for OOP code.

Lunch was loads of fun with the excelent (and fun) company if TetraBoy, LOLCode extrodinare, Spoons and Itrebal. All of a sudden KITT drives around for Eli White’s Development Methodolody talk, with plenty o’tools and Knight Rider references, a great overall look of the dev process. Afterwards Lorna and Skoop gave us an introduction to communities and showed us some examples of how to get it working for us, a great inspirational talk for user group leaders or enthusiasts. The regular sessions finished up with Chris Cornutt’s great overview of 4 big frameworks and how they should affect you life, and what you get with each of them, a great comparison presentation for people still lost on which framework to use.

I quickly stepped out for a conference call with the Brazilian Microsoft representatives and our user group leaders. As for user groups and Microsoft’s role and intentions… it was a great talk and we definativelly have good things to wait for. Some things could have been left out of the meeting and make it much more useful and quick, but I still had to get out before it finished, to go help out in DragonBe’s User group round table, which was awesome and inspiring, and will be detailed in later posts and UG actions.

This conversation went on for very long, so i missed out on testfest and skipped right to retro-gaming nite, which i can say was awesome! Xbox, card games… these guys know how to have fun! And i got to thanka new friend for giving me his prize (I suck with names, but i will update this post with his name), and congratulate the winners of all games and the big XBox elite winner!

This day was incredible, but we still have one morning to go… and a Terry Chay keynote, so day #4 should be a blast!

Ok, i might be a little “DUI” as I write this, but bear with me, i can get it done.

Day #2 kicked off well with a group breakfast again and off we went to the main ballroom for the keynote. Suddenly we get “news” jaws drop to the floor, girlish screams are heard .. Andrei has been kidnapped and Tabini has the picture to prove it. I guess you can ignore and obfuscate the guy behind php|arch and php|tek for so long before he flips! Tabini then went on to talk a bit on arch and tek and finally announced that Andrei was alive..

Andrei came out and delivered on an awesome keynote! Showing us the news in PHP 5.3 and giving us the word on PHP 6, with some fresh news from the PHP Dev Meeting, all with plenty internal jokes and funny pics, a keynote worth watching again! 

The day went on with great sessions, so i’ll mentions the ones i went to. First up was Eli White, Zend’s new goto guy, on scaling applications. An awesome talk that  showed interesting techniques and their evolution, an excelent way of showing you scaling so you realize the “incremental” nature of it. From that i jumped on the search train with Derick’s “Of needles and Haystacks” a peek into the world of search strategies and an introduction to Lucene and Solr.

Lunch as usual was really good and i got in some interesting conversation with Derick and Sara Golemon. After which i headed to Lig’s inaugural session on MySQL tuning, the first session I know of that looked into “settings” tuning, not just query/hardware techniques. Elizabeth followed up dwelling into the twilight zone.. the SPL Zone, showing us the wonderful land of iterators (iteratoriterator.. iterataaaaah) and giving a shout out to the community for help to get all this documented, this is where you com in!

I then moved on to the ballroom to see Sebastian teaching us to test untestable code, or rather, how to fix it and get it done, right! It was an excelent session and eye opening to get some unit testing problems i have had in the past. And that was followed by a surprising and very inspiring talk by Chris Shifflet. Security Driven Design was not a code talk, but a reflection point applying various techniques to web site security, making us all think of how to implement all these diferente things in the most diferent aspects of web development, aside from being a great guy Chris was very inspiring on this talk.

There was still time, so we got the UnCon session going, and i decided to get more info on how to use git to take svn offline with Zend Framework’s own Matthew, a short but very objective session that got me curious and interested in using git.

The evening events would begin later on, so we skipped the hotel to get some genuine out-of-mexico-mexican-food, which was really good. We got back just in time to hit the open bar and watch the Pecha Kucha sessions.. which were way too funny to describe here, suffice it so say Tetraboy won with his LOLCode presentation! Ah.. and I also brought down a genuine bottle of Aged Cachaça and it surely made some sucess.

Another awesome day ate tek, tomorrow more talks and retro-gaming night! Tek-on!

Tutorial day at php|tek! The day begun with a PHP Breakfast, where I met guys like Matthew Weier O’Phinney and saw the guys from yesterday as well. After that I moved on to registration and got my tek swag on!

The first session I attended was a Security Bootcamp by Christian Wenz (@chwenz)  where we analysed some security issues and sample applications, going over some of the basics of PHP security and look at some of the most active players today like XSS and CSRF. It was interesting and refreshing, an overall great tutorial for people looking for the light at the end of a security tunnel, or at least to learn what holes to look for in their applications.

After that we had lunch, cortesy of MTACon. And the afternoon was ready for a kick off with a awesome session, PHP Code Review with Sebastan Bergmann, Arne Blankerts and Stefan Priebsch. This session was an eye opener and loads of fun. Basically we pickup php frameworks and apps, like Habari, Magento and such and look at the code to find the bad, the ugly and the down right down outrageous. The kid  of stuff we found in some apps was simply amazing, from major security issues in Habari to insanelly pointless code in magento. This session was very interactive and pointed out a whole bunch of things we should avoid on a daily basis.

After the sessions we headed over to get some official and famous Chicago Stuffed  Pizza at Giordano’s, it is definativelly aproved! So dinner with 40 PHPers ended up back in the hotel fomr some Hockey and Basketball surrounded by PHP talk.

Ready for the first oficial day of php|tek. By the way… we got some great shirt swag at the conf.. bring money! buy shirts!

Pictures on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=phptek+OR+tek09&m=tags&d=taken-20090515-20090525&ss=2&ct=0&w=all

Update: Seems the security issue is not major, as it occurs only during installation. It is however still a security issue and a violation of the “filter all input” mantra.