.. articleMetaData:: :Where: Frankfurt, Germany
Finally back from the PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The last few days tons of people attended this years Conference to listen to sessions with PHP related subjects and drink beer, LOTS of beer. Session topics were broad, from Zend Internals in English to Object Oriented Design in German. Having sessions in German is IMO not a good thing to have, it decreases the quality of the conference for international visitors. Perhaps this is why there is a new conference announced; at the end of April 2003 or the beginning of May 2003 there will be held a Spring version in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Those folks asked me to be on the chair, so that I can help decide which talks get accepted. I'm pretty sure all talks will be in English, as having talks in Dutch would be plain stupid.
S&S, the organisers of the conference finally announced the birth of a brandnew english PHP Magazine, surprisingly called "PHP Magazine". This english cousin to the German PHP Magazin will have high quality articles on PHP related issues and will be focussed on professional PHP users. Together with Jan Lehnardt I'm the chief editor, so if you have proposals for articles, or just other opinions, feel free to mail me.
This year the hotel was equipped with WLAN, so that was pretty cool. What not so cool was, was the shitty crappy login system those dudes used. You could buy a login/password at the hotel desk for about € 9 a day, but we soon discovered that it was pretty easy to add our own accounts, those donkeys printed the login/password for their admin interface on each printout. Soon we had about 10 accounts registered on Rasmus's name, but he didn't even attend this conference. This also resulted in the markings on the hotel's wall like you can see on the right side.
All things considered, it was a pretty good conference and I would certainly recommend to everybody working with PHP to come to the Spring edition in Amsterdam, not only because of the quality of the sessions, but also because of the great atmosphere that was present during this one. There were also rumors about free weed at the one in Amsterdam....