Yesterday I finished up my second day at ZendCon and learned a few more things:

1. ZendCon should be renamed to ZendFrameworkCon for next year
2. Most talks are high-level presentations and very few show the code that matters to me and presumably most programmers attending
3. Terry Chay is still one of the best presenters I have seen (note: I did not count the # of swear words he used, but if you want to check search for #tcfc on Twitter
4. I clearly need to learn how to use SPL and Iterators more in my code
5. Selenium and PHPUnit are testing suites I need to work more with and properly implement
6. I finally have a reason to move to Zend Studio 6 over Zend Studio 5.5 that I have been using for the last two years
7. You can control a presentation using your iPhone
8. The Ajaxian guys not only make a great website and podcast their presentations are beautiful.

Here are the sessions I attending on Wednesday:

• Magento eCommerce and the Next Generation of PHP Applications
• Pick Your Protocol: Creating Web Services with Zend Framework
• Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications
• State of Ajax
• PHP and AJAX Made Easier with Zend
• Zend_Tool: Rapid Application Development with Zend Framework

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.