eZ conference 2007

Last week i attended eZ conference 2007. It was my first ever PHP conference and it was a blast. We arrived at Skien on wednesday and saw the Norwegian nationals team (football) score 5 nice goals (i predicted this! to bad one of them was wrongfully disallowed). We took a early night on wednesday to be ready for the conference.

Thursday was a really nice day. I got to get to know the people behind many of the IRC nicks as well as some new people. I attended the open source track the entire day.

First i heard Damien Seguy talk about php tips and tricks. I knew most of the stuff but there was some nice things there I will look into. like extract and compact.

While at the conference floor I also got to test out the massage chairs there. We also talked to a very nice columbian guy called Fellipe.

Then i listened to toby speak about ezComponents. I have not looked much at the ezComponents and i found it very interesting. I plan to try them out on a future project quite soon.

Then we had a nice lunch and got to meet some new people. Some guys from EnterNett in Stavager and some from ObjectNet in Oslo.

I listened to Paul Borgermans keynote but did not find it that interesting. Then a talk from a investigator from KRIPOS about security. Some of it was well known, but I still found it interesting.

I was pretty tired now so i decided to head back to the Høyers Hotel for a nice nap and dinner before the awards. We (Espen and I) had dinner with the guys from EnterNett at Høyers. I had a lovely steak with cream stewed potatoes and a beer. The awards and the party after was nice, but i do not understand why they always must have so loud music. It is impossible to talk.

Friday arrived and I was relaxed and ready for a new day. It started off with a great keynote by the head of VG multimedia Jo Christian Oterhals. He talked about what VG (the largest newspaper both deadtree and online, in norway) has done to their publication system. They are currently using the LAMP stack with the addition of Varnish and memcached. It was really interesting to hear him talking about how they want to "destroy" things.

I then listened to Sebastian Bergmann talk bout workflow. It was really interesting and i see that in large system with complex workflows it can be very nice. It was a nice talk and Sebastian obviously has prepared heavily for it. The XML syntax to describe the workflow looked a little bit verbose at the first glance, but I was told (by both Sebastian and Fredrik) that it is not verbose at all compared to other workflow engines. Sebastian also mentioned a AJAX client in the works for creating workflow. That sounds really cool.

Then it was time for a talk about Varnish. I was really looking forward to this one since i have looked a little bit at Varnish and it looks really cool. The speaker Dag-Erling Smørgrav turned out to be very very tech savvy. He held a extremely informative presentation about Varnish, and was not afraid to point out flaws in any system. As he blogs about himself the eZ publish developers were very interested in this. His talk was scheduled to last for 45 minutes. It ate away 30 minutes of our lunch as well. 30 minutes well spent if you ask me.

Then it was time for lunch and i chatted with Dag-Erling while getting some food. I told him that i thought his presentation was very nice, and he confirmed that he had heard so from many other people as well. He then told me to prepare for a blast, as he had heard Zak Greant practice for his keynote. I ate lunch and was really looking forward to this keynote.

I sat down in second row and was enthralled as Zak Greant started his talk. His presentation was soooo goog. It flowed like it was natural. The slides where perfectly suited for this style of talk and the content was golden. The title of Zak´s speech sums it up pretty good "A Visionary look at Open Source". To be short he compared the way the software business is going with how the written word progressed. If you have the chance do not miss this speech!

Then i attended Derick Rethans as he spoke about PHP internals. It was very interesting to see how the internals of PHP worked. It was getting late and i was getting tired. I started to listen to the certified extensions talk by Jostein Knutsen but i left, then i listened in on the last of Ole Marius Smestad talk about eZ Publish. He showed how he could upload a picture taken from his mobile phone using iLabs java client. Looked to be working nicely. At my work we do it with MMS. I was going to raise my hand to talk about this, that is if there are any extensions for eZ Publish to communicate to and from a cellphone, but I was to tired so I did not.

Dinner was spent at a restaurant just outside the Clarion Hotel. I had a very nice pesto marinated calf meat with potatoes. We then went to find some people to talk to and found some guys from waterproof at a barge outside clarion. We chatted with them and heard that people where gathering at New Mets sports bar at 22. The evening out was really nice. I went home at about 01.00.


As always i take to few and to bad pictures. But if you want to see them here are some of them at flickr

I will probably blog about php vikinger later on :)