The international PHP Conference
It’s almost a week since I left the PHP conference in Frankfurt. At first I was quite happy with it. It was really nice to get down there and talk to so many nice people. I had very interesting chats with Kaj Arnö, VP of open source community relations from MySQL and Jeremy Johnstone from Yahoo as well as a late night talk with Ivo Jansch from ATK that had a booth in the exhibition.
However, now that I think back, the conference in Frankfurt could have been a lot better. It should have been better considering the money they charge. Most of the sessions were way to shallow and a few were mere walkthroughs of simple code examples that you can read up on in 15 minutes in so many places on the web. Some sessions I attended were more like a two hour introduction into a topic. These beginner sessions have their place in a conference like this but they were too many. Most of the speakers are probably very knowledgeble in their respective area. Unfortunately very few showed it.
I think it would be much more valuable if more sessions were geared towards more experienced developers. I would like to see more sessions on case studies, best practices, experiences from using different techniques and systems in large installations or common/uncommon problems and how to solve them. Only Björn Schotte didn’t disapoint me in this respect. Especially sessions regarding web services and integration should have benefited from such an approach. I’d better admit that I didn’t attend many database sessions. So I don’t know if they were better than the more PHP specific ones.
Maybe I would have liked the Management Day. I don’t know. Since it was all in german I couldn’t attend. Which brings me to my next complaint. I understand that the organizer is a german company. A few german sessions would be fine. However, the conference is called “International” as in the English magazine from this very company. Even the O’Reilly booth featured mostly books in the german language. Maybe I’m just a bit annoyed since I missed a few sessions due to the language barrier.
I’m not going to say much about the wireless connection. It was bad. Many others have written more on this topic.
Well, if I go next year, I’ll skip the two workshop days anyway. Those were clearly not worth the money.
(Oh by the way – Derick Rethans seems to be much nicer in real life than he is in emails.)
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