Since the last week of March, I've been SO busy...
Some of it work-related stuff, some of it other-work-related stuff (which some of you already know about, but I'll talk about this more in a week (or so))...
I managed to actually release Mail_Mime (as you may have read about in a previous entry). I attended PHP Quebec (as you may read about in the second part of this entry), and unless the building inspection turns up something unexpected, I'll soon be the owner of my first house.
Anyway, I've been meaning to write a little bit about Conference PHP Quebec, but because of the aforementioned busy-ness (and business), I haven't had time. So, tonight, after my daughter has (finally!) fallen asleep, and my wife well on her way, I pulled out the laptop, and, from the comfort of my side of the bed, am finally jotting down a few things about this wonderful conference.
Now, I'm no conference connaisseur, but the 2005 Conference PHP Quebec was the best conference I've ever been to. Admittedly, I've only ever been to the 2003 and 2004 editions of the same, so I may just be a naive conference-goer.
By a huge margin, my favourite part of the conference was simply getting to spend some time, face-to-face, with guys who I've only ever been able to talk to on IRC and mailing lists. I spent a great deal of non-workshop time with Derick, Ilia, Toby, Marcus(helly) and John(coogle). I also had the opportunity to spend some time chatting with Shane Caraveo (Activestate), Chris Shiflett (Brainbulb), Daniel Kushner (Zend), and Rasmus (everyone knows Rasmus, right?).
I got to take the Zend Cert exam, which was, on one hand, easier than expected (so glad I didn't have to know the parameter order of the twisted string/array libraries), and on the other hand, harder than expected (three+ levels of reference tracing within the code I was expected to head-parse).
Damien invited me to the speakers/sponsors dinner, which was really a highlight of the conference, for me. As I said, I got to spend some time with the various community members, and joking around/talking shop with these guys while eating a VERY good gourmet french meal (smoked duck, blueberry bison, and the best creme brulee I've ever had), and drinking good wine was just all-around a great time.
Chris Shiflett's session tied Marcus Boerger's in my mind--both of them were great. Lots of great info was shared. Toby's, while interesting, covered mostly stuff I'm already well-versed on (I even got to speak for a few minutes, near the end, when someone asked about .phpt).
The little bit of time I got to spend talking to Rasmus really opened my eyes (Rasmus, if you're reading this, please don't take it the wrong way): I gained much respect for him. See, before this year, I'd never talked to him one-on-one, really. I'd only attended his sessions (which, the first year was interesting, because I was (shamefully, now) somewhat starstruck, and the second year moderately interesting). What bugged me most was the Rasmus fanboys who seem to worship the guy (yes, I said starstruck, but I didn't WORSHIP him ok? (-: ). It seemed like his time had passed, and the proverbial reins of our favourite language were taken up by the likes of Andi and Zeev. It seemed to me that Rasmus was now (then) riding the fame-wave.
Well, I'm happy to admit that I was completely wrong. (-: (And if you're still reading, I'm sorry for doubting you.) Every time I heard him speak, in smaller groups, this time, he spoke intelligently of things like character encodings and APC, when he spoke candidly about PHP Internals, Filtering (because we'd had a brief spat on internals), and even Yahoo!, it was with wisdom, and not arrogance. It's really hard to explain, but he went from "hack" to "hacker" in my mind. I feel somewhat stupid for writing off his intelligence as one Rasmussing talk after another.
That said, I had the privilege of talking, eating, learning and drinking with some VERY intelligent people, those two days. I can't wait until we can get together again (Toby tried to convince me to submit a paper for the conference in Frankfurt, this fall.. we'll see (-: ).
Last thought: I was making stupid faces in every photo that was taken, it seems.. yay me.
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