⇥ Some cool things that are happening around php|tek
February is usually a time of the year that I both love and hate. The reason for the latter emotion I am looking at in this very moment through a layer of inert gas sandwiched between two layers of glass: it’s -22ºC this morning in sunny Toronto, and just about the only good thing is that it isn’t snowing and there is no giant monster destroying the house on the other side of my backyard.
On the other hand, February is usually when the many fun and interesting activities that surround our spring conference php|tek start taking place—and this year is no exception. In fact, this year that are more people working—hellbent might be a better word, given their enthusiasm—on making |tek a memorable occasion for PHP developers from all over the world to meet up, learn and network. Here are some highlights:
- Andrei Zmievski—who is now Open Source Fellow at Digg—will be our featured keynote speaker; as you probably know, Andrei has recently started steering the development of PHP 6 again—it will be interesting to hear him talk about his vision for the next release of the platform and figure out how we can all facilitate the inevitable porting of our software packages to it. I am also proud that, for the first time in the six or seven years that I’ve known Andrei I have, apparently, managed not to misspell his last name in any of our PR materials. Of course, I misspelled everything else, but, hey, you can’t win them all.
- My colleague Keith Casey is pulling double duty, organizing both a series of free webcasts and an unconference-within-the-conference at php|tek. Adobe is going to be our main sponsor for the webcasts (although the signage is not up yet), and we’re very grateful for their help.
- Speaking of colleagues, Matthew Turland, consultant extraordinaire at Blue Parabola, is also putting together a Hackathon to take place one of the evenings during the conference. This will be a great opportunity to contribute to one of a number of open-source projects (including PHP itself) while picking up a new trick or two from fellow developers.
This is, by no means, the last of the news you’ll hear from the php|tek camp—and that’s probably why we’re selling tickets faster than any other year… so, if you’re planning on procrastinating, I urge you to consider signing up before it’s too late—we’ve even extended our early-bird pricing until February 28!
Comments
I misspelled Andrei’s name just the other day. Oh the embarrassment! So much for my six year streak.