Yesterday was the first official day of talks for ZendCon 2009.  After last year I didn’t know if I was going to take the plunge this year and attend this year due to my distaste for ZendFrameworkCon that I experienced last year.  After one day I can say that this year’s conference has been great.  Great talks (mostly), great people and a great location.

This year I have been participating in the IRC backchannel (#zendcon on freenode), Twitter and Google Wave with many of the fellow ZendCon attendees.  They make it possible for me to hear about what is happening throughout the conference and in the case of Google Wave I can view the notes taken in all of the different talks I wasn’t able to make it to.  Sometimes after reading the live notes I wanted to leave my session, but overall so far I have enjoyed the talks.

Here is the list of what I made it to yesterday:

• Planning for Synchronization w/ Browser-Local Databases
• Xdebug – PHP Developer’s swiss-army knife
• Il8n with PHP 5.3
• Enterprise-Class PHP Security
• Seven Steps to Better OOP Code

The keynote about the cloud after the ZCE lunch was less than interesting, but thankfully the IRC chat made it exciting. I’m looking forward to the PHP Framework shootout tomorrow, which I expect will be the best Keynote of the conference.

Last night ended with going to the local bar Firehouse which is part owned by my friend from when I still lived in San Jose.  Ended up running into several friends I haven’t seen in over 3 years and catching up with them, which was great.  Still hurting a bit this morning from partying last night, but I made it to the breakfast and keynote this morning.

Now on to seizing the day!