Comments on: PHPNW Conference 2008 Review

By: phil

phil — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:27:50 +0000

@Chris Gibson: Good question. Two of the talks directly related to my current work. A talk about starting to use Zend framework and a talk about how PHP websites can be exploited via PHP – so how would a hacker would attempt to hack your site?

Both talks were great topics and both talks were delivered in less than exciting manner.

With conferences/networking events, it’s often the people you meet in between talks and the things you learn from them which can be more valuable than the presentations.

By: Chris Gibson

Chris Gibson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:08:16 +0000

PHPNW sounds interesting, but would you say that it was worth it from a freelance/business perspective? What would you say that you learnt? What did you take away from the conference that will help you work faster and/or smarter? These aren’t loaded questions, I’m genuinely interested.

By: phil

phil — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:34:36 +0000

@David Goodwin: Great comment. I actually got a t-shirt but couldn’t see myself ever wearing it – so left it on my seat.

By: David Goodwin

David Goodwin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:29:05 +0000

I thought phpnw08 was pretty good – everyone was friendly, and it was nice to see a few familiar faces.

My bad points were :

a) There weren’t t-shirts for everyone (I sponsored the t-shirts and had expected to get our company logo everywhere!!)

b) I think it would have been useful for there to have been lightening talks (i.e. you turn up and on the spur of the moment, following someone else’s talk or a general chat between friends, you see there’s interest for $additional_talk – so you write down on a board, and sometime later you continue the discussion/tell everyone why $x is so good). Admittedly, this requires participation from the delegates, and if they’re not feeling very interactive then this will fail.

c) Timetable should have had a sentence/paragraph about what a talk is on; some talks I couldn’t figure out what they would be on, so ended up hassling someone like Lorna… I’m sure others had this problem. Perhaps if talks could have some form of rating – i.e. subject difficulty and area…?

Good points :

a) Different type of topics covered in comparison to PHPLondon

b) More than one track of talks

c) Everything appeared to go to plan

d) I came away with a free book, free 12 month PHPArchitect subscription, free mug, free t-shirt, free memory-stick

e) Venue was much easier to get to than e.g. central london

I think I should have, in retrospect offered to do a talk on Propel and/or Smarty. and/or security .. but ho hum.