PHPNW09

Trains grrrrrrrr, that is all I have to say about that.

I missed the first few minutes of the keynote but really enjoyed all I heard. Kevlin Henney talked about the uncertainty principle in software development, the tendency to make big decisions at the point of least knowledge in the project cycle. Kevlin advocated a change in thinking! Watch the video when it becomes available, it's well worth your time.

I attended a talk by Marcus Deglos, "Speeding up the snail and making Drupal scale", Marcus talked about the available options that can speed up a Drupal site.

• Drupal page caching
• APC
• Memcache
• Varnish

Marcus went on to compare the performance results of two sites, it transpired that one of the sites was badly written with business logic and SQL in the theme layer so nothing but Varnish was ever going to improve the performance of that site!

I also attended a talk on the Yii application framework given by our good friend Steve Richardson, Steve braved technology to perform a live demo building a blog application in 30 minutes. Very impressive!

As always, some of the best bits for me were in between the sessions. It was good to mingle and meet people I'd only talked to on Skype previously.

Another highlight was the getting involved talk by Scott MacVicar. He explained that the PHP team really welcome contributions and that actually, it's quite easy to get involved. When Scott mentioned documentation, I immediately thought about the comments section of the PHP function docs, it's a pain trawling through to find the useful stuff and as Fiona pointed out, there's some real rubbish on there. Fiona suggested a rating system so users can promote the good stuff and demote the bad to which Scott invited a code contribution. I'd love to work on that feature, are you up for it Fiona?

So well done to the organisers, especially all at http://www.solutionperspective.co.uk/ for putting on a well organised and enjoyable conference, to all the speakers and sponsors and to the staff and caterers at the Manchester Conference Centre.

Oh, and by the way, I won a book! I'm going for a hat-trick next year :)