conference

Sunday

Due to the crappy train service from my home town I had to drive into Manchester on Sunday, but made it in good time to have a coffee before we went to vote on the talks. Some people had a heavy night drinking the night before and therefore didn't make it in the morning (or at all). Some has also opted to only attend the Saturday and so there were a few faces missing, but there were still plenty of people there.

This weekend saw the PHP Unconference Europe 2011 event in Manchester. The organisers were hoping that the rain would hold off for the weekend, and being true to form Manchester was wet and cold. Being an unconference the talks and discussions are mainly casual and dependent on what everyone decided to see on the day. The event ran across Saturday and Sunday with different talks on each day.

This weekend saw the 3rd PHPNW conference and being a PHP developer, working in Manchester, it would be inexcusable for me not to attend :). After missing my train and pouring my first coffee of the day into my conference pack it wasn't the best of starts. However, I still managed to turn up in plenty of time so I didn't miss any of the talks and got to say hello to the people I know from the PHPNW user group and some who I met at the PHPNW conference in previous years.

Day 1

Keynote: Teach a Man to Fish: Coaching Development Teams
Lorna Mitchell @lornajane

WordCampUK is an informal 2 day conference and barcamp that centred around using, working with and developing in WordPress. This year's WordCampUK was held in Manchester and so being local I could hardly miss the opportunity to attend. It was a great event, with great talks and lots of friendly people who were really enthusiastic about WordPress.

Last weekend saw the second annual PHPNW conference, and it was an excellent conference. There were some 200 people attending the event and we got to see some interesting and informative talks. When I arrived at the talk I received a bag with some brochures in it as well as a KitKat (which I ate for breakfast) and a years subscription to PHP|Architect. Everyone at the conference was also fed very well for lunch and dinner and Sun sponsored a free bar at the end of the first day, which was nice.

What I thought I'd do is go through each of the talks that I attended and copy in my responses from the joind.in reviews that I have been posting during the week, but also embellish them with further thoughts and comments. Also, joind.in seem to have deleted one or two of my reviews so I will have to write them from scratch anyway.

The PHPNW conference was this weekend, and 8 members of staff from my company showed up to support the PHP community and learn a couple of things along the way. The conference consisted of 174 attendees, with 12 sessions hosted by 16 speakers.

The talks ranged from simple usability and design to getting started in Drupal and they were all well researched, planned and executed. I was especially impressed with the 3D timeline used in the Twittex talk.

The two talks that stood out for me where the Introduction to the Zend Framework and HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes. I will definitely be looking into these two products, and perhaps even buying a book on the Zend Framework.