PHP Day 2012 in Verona was my first “real” PHP conference. I was excited like a little boy and was expecting tons of great talks and bunch of PHP awesomeness.
My expectations were nothing compared to what I was part of. Not only the conference, speakers and themes, but the community. Community of some of the greatest PHPers in the world. Hell, even The father of PHP Rasmus was there.
To quote the president of PEAR David Coallier, I embraced my phpness (you have to read this out loud to understand) in full.
David also made some good action points about PHP Today and some great projects based on PHP like Symphony, NodePHP (which was officially made public on the second day of the conference), Agavi and many more.
PhpDay started with a salespitch keynote from Zeev Suraski from Zend, who presented Zend Developer Cloud and motivate us to become PHP Heroes. It can be used for developing purposes at the moment and looks very promising.
Another great keynote was done by Rasmus Lerdorf which ashamed us all by pointing out that we don’t contribute to PHP community as much as we could.
I always thought that programming and promoting PHP is enough, as I don’t know C++, but Rasmus told us that we can help by identifying bugs that are not bugs, but lack of knowledge or misconfiguration. I hope I will use Rasmus’ random bug feature and help these great guys do their jobs even better. You should do it, too.
Speakers were really great:
Lorna Jane Mitchell really opened my eyes for Best Practices in API design.
There were 2 workshops, one from Jacopo Romei on Symphony2 and another one from Patrick Allaert who tried to teach us to write PHP extensions.
It is really hard to mention everything that happened in this 2 amazing PHP days, you can see everything that took place on official page.
I wish to thanks the organizers, GRUSP who made a tremendous amount of job to make all this happen.