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!

Yesterday I attended the first day of 2.5 days of ZendCon 2008.  This was the second year I have attended and much more relaxing knowning that I do not need to take a test this year.  Last year I became a PHP5 Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE), this year I got a shiny grey ribbon attached to my badge.

I sat in on the following sessions:

• Insights from the Experts: How PHP Leaders Are Transforming High-Impact PHP Applications
• Of Haystacks and Needles
• Tiery Eyed
• Distribution and Publication With Atom Web Services
• The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development
• Top Zend Studio Secrets
• Elegant Ways of Handling PHP Errors and Exceptions

As a whole the day was much more involved and more content than last year.  The two sessions that stood out for the day were Distribution and Publication With Atom Web Services and The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development which if you know Ben Ramsey or Eli White you know why I enjoyed their talks the most.  Eli was even able to incorporate The Hoff in his presentation, which I’m sure thrilled the German attendees. I’m looking forward to using the Atom publishing and can finally see the difference between RSS 2.0 and Atom and why the developer community has been on the Atom side.

Twitter is being used by several of us heavily and you can view all messages from attendies using the following hash: #zendcon

I have gathered lots of info and looking forward to using the information I have and will learn this week during my talk at TulsaTechFest 2008.

More tomorrow.