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It’s been a while since I last attended an international conference. In fact, my last one was the unforgetable 2008 Dutch PHP Conference. It was also my first time at the London conference. It actually turned out to be a great one, hence this review.

As my dear friend Felix De Vliegher experienced (the hard way) last edition:

Do not travel to this one the day of the conference and under no circumstances travel back the same day!

. If you want to avoid getting up at 4 AM and missing out on the final part of the conference, your best move is to arrive on Thursday and leave on Saturday.

I took Felix’ advice and joined him on the Eurostar in order to enjoy the pre-conference social. Off course our partner in crime Michelangelo van Dam joined in as well. We knew there were plenty more Belgians scheduled to be in London too, so we were up for a good one.

After the arrival we split up because Felix and Michelangelo were staying in a different hotel than I was. Being part of IBuildings, their hotel reservations were taken care of by the company. I took the geographical advantage and booked myself a room in the Hilton Olympia hotel opposite the venue. Although this should seem a very fancy hotel, it turned out to be quite average, but I guess the room rate was an indicator… Nevertheless it was very clean and very close.

It didn’t take me that long to unpack and I quickly started my 15 minute walk to Brook Green hotel where there was a PHP meetup. The basement bar was the scene of the crime where the legendary Derick Rethans held a pre-conference presentation on his D-BUS extension. Afterwards there was a short talk by Sara Golemon on Search Monkey, an open search platform by Yahoo. Sara, I love your book on PHP extension writing!

Lots of networking going on as well: I ran into my pal Jeroen Moors from Fluoline who was chatting it up. You gotta love those Limburg people. Off course there were a vast amount of IBuildings staff at the spot which was actually inevitable since they rule the European PHP game and they’re the event’s main sponsor.

To finish the night, Mikko Koppanen lured us into some London kebab trap. We actually went for the first place in the vicinity of Brook Green. It turned out to be a sketchy-as-hell Serbian Mob joint where they happened to serve some kebab. Our gang consisted of:

• Me
• Felix De Vliegher
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Mikko Koppanen
• Ivo Jansch
• Lorenzo Alberton

The food was actually horrendous: charcoal kebab floating in a disgusting pool of grease decorated with some half-baked logs known as fries. Needless to say there was a certain salmonella risk… Felix’ million dollar facial expression confirmed this when receiving his plate. Afterwards my stomach gave me very clear signals never to go there again. Lorenzo had the same thing going on, I feel for you bro! The 15 minute walk back did me good and I decided to do some late night coding on my personal project back in the hotel.

8h30, conference time! I could sleep quite long since the venue was just 2 minutes from the hotel, but when I arrive things were rather crowded. I had to queue at the registration boot where it took the guys from PHP London a terrible long time to find my name on the list. I guess Thijs Feryn is not a common name in Britain. No worries … I’m a patient bloke.

Finally I ran into Dirk Bonhomme and Chris Ramakers, my friends from Inventis. We had a quick chat and then headed for the auditorium where Aral Balkan give us a very energetic talk on the future. This was a spectacular talk which was the keynote of the day called The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades. It was very Flash and Adobe oriented, but I didn’t really mind because it was entertaining and quite informative as well.

I also went to see a talk called Sharding Architectures by David Soria Parra. It featured sharding techniques in MySQL which I find very interesting. Unfortunately it wasn’t that ‘in depth’ and some concepts where quite hard to understand, especially a sharding. I was a little disappointed by this one.

Luckily I continued by attending David Axmark’s talk called Clouds on the horizon? Get ready for Drizzle. It is in fact an honour to see this guy at work, because he’s one of the founding members of the MySQL database. Pretty cool huh! He talked about Drizzle, a database system similar to MySQL which is actually based on a fork of the MySQL 6 source code. The emphasis of the Drizzle project is going back to the roots of the open source system by throwing out all that is not necessary. You can say that performance is their main goal. I really look forward to giving it a go!

Next up was Hank Janssen, Microsoft’s open source dude who came to talk about PHP integration in Windows. Since I’m in the webhosting business, this is an essential for me. I’m also a LAMP guy, so development on Windows is out of the question for me, but still … I gave it a go. The talk didn’t give me that much information on the current solutions for PHP on Windows, but he did a great job explaining what his open source department did and how it was a community friendly thing. I seem to trust to guy and I honestly hope he can make Windows a more stable and compatible operating system for PHP developers. This might sound weird, but there are actually people out there who develop on Windows. They should at least have the chance to run their apps on a (more or less) stable system.

Afterwards I went to see Stefan Koopmanschap, better know as Stefn Koowpmanshjap to native English speaking people. He brought us a playful presentation on the Symfony framework. This presentation was themed and was actually a MythBusters parody. His version was MyPHPBusters (Do mind the PHP pronunciation and the elePHPant anology). He busted a couple of myths on Symfony and his conclusion was that Symfony is a really cool framework, but it should only be used in situations where a full stack framework is needed. Good stuff Stefan, I enjoyed it!

Finally I went to see Chris Shiflett during a presentation called Security-Centered Design - exploring the impact of human behavior. He started by saying that he still loves security, but that he’s getting bored of the technical implementation. This set the tone for the rest of the talk which was without any doubt the best one of the event. He demonstrated with some real life, non-IT examples how the phishing, social engineering and the false feeling of security is really an issue in the world we live in. He also gave us some conceptual anti-phishing advice and some info on security through usibility. You rule Chris!

The event ended with an open bar courtesy of MySQL (which is now actually Sun). Thanks MySQL or sun or … who cares, I got myself some free Coca Cola. I should also thank Jeroen Moors from Fluoline who bought me dinner at the local Pizza Express. Sloppy Guiseppe’s FTW my friend. Next dinner is on me dude! And to the guy from Newcastle I met at the post-conference social: keep sporting the toon !

This is where it ends, a good conference definitely worth revisiting!

Did you know I missed out on:

• U2 who gave a free rooftop concert in London that day
• Arsenal vs Fulham . I like the Gunners and would love to see them in action once.