Blog.feryn.eu

The day after a PHP conference is the day you are most excited about PHP and the community. This statement also applies to me: I am very excited about PHP and the community after a fantastic PHPBenelux Conference (aka phpbnl10). Ter Elst in Edegem (Antwerpen) was the venue and hosting an international PHP conference was the goal.

The enthousiams for me is even greater because for the first time I assisted in organizing a conference. In fact it’s the first time this conference is organized.

Organizing it

Who’s who

After the merge between PHPBelgium and phpGG it was made very clear that our goal was to organize a real conference. We all had our experiences with user group meetings, but this was a different thing.

I have always felt like “the new guy” in the group and I feel fortunate to be surrounded by a group of very experienced people.

• There are community icons like Michelangelo van Dam(aka dragonbe) and Stefan Koopmanschap (aka skoop).
• There are expert open source contributors like Paul Borgermans and Patrick Allaert
• There are the incredibly dedicated and talented Dutch co-members Rein Velt, Kana Yeh and Gerrit te Sligte (aka Remi)
• And of course there’s my partner in (PHP) crime Felix De Vliegher

I know I put in a lot of work and energy, but it’s nothing compared to what Mike and Stefan put in. They are community animals, so this stuff comes natural to them, but nevertheless: thank you for doing this.

The practical stuff

There’s so much stuff that you have to take into account:

• The venue
• The sponsors
• The printwork
• The announcements & communication
• The speakers
• The call for papers
• The hotel
• The income and expenses
• The pricing
• The website
• The attendees
• …

It took us a while to figure all of it out, but (as it seems) we didn’t do that bad of a job. I admit, some things were done absolutely last minute, but hey: it got done. I’m sure that due to the experience we now have, the phpbnl11 conference will be even better.

Pre-conference

Friday preparations

After lots of Skype meetings, group mails and discussions, it was finally time to meet up and make it happen.

I ordered the goodie bags, the sponsors brought all the goodies and Mike made sure there were prints to attach to the bags. Rein took care of the lanyards whereas Remi had the badges covered. You should have seen it: a real chain gang.

Picking the speakers up

When you’re organizing an international conference, you need international speakers and those people need to be picked up from airports and railway stations. There was even some carpooling going on.

My task was picking up Fabien Potencier which I had already picked up some time ago during the Symfony Bug Hunt Day. Apparently this proved to be a challenge.

I won’t bother you with the complete story, but I managed to show up in at the Central Station in Antwerp at 3 occasions without finding Fabien. Apparently there was a communication problem and the time of arrival proved to be the time of departure. During my 3 visits to the station there was one little gap I couldn’t cover due to transportation and parking and that was the exact moment Fabien did arrive.

Luckily Fabien showed up safely the day after and had to take a taxi from the station to the hotel. Although I was a little annoyed with the situation, I was actually happy to see Fabien show up. If you’re reading this, Fabien: don’t worry, I’m perfectly cool with the situation and will definitely pick you up again when there’s another PHPBenelux event.

Speakers dinner

The speakers dinner is always good fun and this one proved to be no different. We decided to eat at Da Giovanni , a colourful Italian restaurant near De Groenplaats and the cathedral.

The funny thing about this place (do check their website to see for yourself) is that everything in the place has a white/red squared design. The waiters have an attitude and know how to use. In fact, almost none of the waiters are Italians (most of them are Morrocans or so), but they all pretend to be full blown Italians. Lots of prego’s and gracie’s.

Good food, good company and a feeling that I’m slowly being part of the PHP community clique.

Drinks

After a lovely dinner, we went to De Vagant, apparently an established jenever bar.

It was rather quiet out there and except for the speakers and crew only a couple of attendees. We did have some fun and had a couple of drinks. But everyone agreed that going to the hotel was a good idea. We had to be on top of our game for the conference and there was still some last minute details that needed to be figured out.

On the way back to the hotel, I offered Kore Nordmann a drive. I only knew him as a speaker and PHP expert, but I had the opportunity to get to know him as a person too. Cool dude, I must say!

Conference day

T-minus one hour

I got up at 7 am (which was quite an effort), enjoyed a nice breakfast and joined the ever so charming Cal Evans. This guy hopped into a plane from the US to present the closing keynote at our conference and had to leave the day after. Talk about dedication. I knew my fellow PHPBenelux co-members had a high opinion of him, but now I can confirm this myself. Thanks for making it to Antwerpen, Cal !

After a quick breakfast, we had to bring in all the goodie bags. In the meanwhile Stefan was already assisting the sponsors with their boot setups. Things looked very promising at that moment.

Only one thing caught us (or should I say the attendees) off guard: the night before the conference it had snowed and a lot of roads weren’t cleared yet. This forced us to kick off with a 15 minute delay.

Kickoff

Opening keynote

Derick Rethans was our opening keynote speakers. This guy needs NO introduction. I’ve seen a lot of his talks, even a couple of keynotes, but for this occasion he had prepared an entirely new keynote called The PHP universe. Really good stuff about how the so called PHP ecosystem.

Track 1

After the opening keynote, the schedule was split up into 2 tracks. I decided to stay in track 1 for a while where I assisted with the room management.

Fabien Potencier was first up with a brilliant talk about dependency injection in PHP 5.2 and 5.3. The new features in PHP 5.3 he used to illustrate his point were excellent. I did not know that lambda functions and closures could be so convenient when using dependency injection and avoiding overhead.

David Zülke was next with a talk about the state of SOAP. I have been using a lot of SOAP webservices the last couple of years, so I was very interested. This talk confirmed lots of things I did know about SOAP and taught me a couple of new things as well. Besides being a real PHP expert and a cool guy, David’s English is exceptionally good.

Track two

I would have loved to see Juliette Reinders Folmer’s talk about regular expressions, but I felt I had to support Patrick Allaert and Davide Mendolia. Their talk was about APM and Pinba: two open source projects that deal with monitoring. It’s not about monitoring the server itself, but more about monitoring it from a PHP point of view.

Very interesting talk, but unfortunately, the message dissolved in the chaos that emerged from the technical failures. I really felt bad for you guys, but I hope you’ll learn from your mistakes.

And Juliette: I promise I will attend your regex talk in London next month. I’ll have a front row seat!

After lunch (which was great actually, much better than the luches we usually get at conferences) I decided to check out Kore Nordmann’s talk about CouchDb and PHPillow. Really advanced shizzle! I already saw a similar talk he gave at PHPVikinger, so I knew what to expect. For people who aren’t familiar with non-relational databases, this seemed like rocket science. I will definitely try some PHPillow myself.

Back to track one

Next up was Lorna Mitchell. Lorna is the community liaison for Ibuildings and she has built up a rocksolid reputation in a very short time. Here talk was great and dealt with the so called Joel test. Unfortunately, I had to leave early because Fabien needed a ride back to the station.

I’m really excited with the fact that Lorna will be in charge of The Dutch PHP Conference this year. It has always been a top conference and I’m sure this year will be a great edition as well. Good luck!

Nearing the end

We were nearing the end of the conference and I learned that Eric Ritchie couldn’t make it to Antwerpen. He got stuck somewhere, but luckily technology saved us. He managed to give his talk remotely and the audio/video was broadcasted into the conference room. I even heared that there was a microphone in the room that allowed the crowd to give real time feedback.

The closing keynote was the much anticipated Open teams talk by Cal Evans. Cal illustrated in his signature style how corporate development teams can benefit by adopting open source development principals.

I must say: I like his ideas and I would love to see this in action, but I thing a lot of managers will be frightened by some of his propositions. Nevertheless, it can happen, we only need a couple of courageous companies to lead the way.

The end

Conference social

As Cal stated: he was the one thing standing between the conference attendees and an open bar. After his keynote there was still the obligatory conference closing statement which Stefan did very well. Everyone involved received a nice thank you and gifts were handed out to the speakers.

After those formalities, people rushed to the open bar (thank you Ibuildings for sponsoring this).

I had to leave quite early, but I heared the bowling event was a great success.

Cool people I met

• The entire PHPBenelux crew
• Cal Evans
• Kore Nordmann
• David Zülke
• Derick Rethans
• Juliette Reinders Folmer
• Katrien de Graeve at Microsoft
• Rick Buitenman and Ronald Kleverlaan at WEBclusive
• Tom Claus and Stijn Janssen at Inventis
• Christian Durel at Zend
• Nick Belhomme
• Andries Seutens
• Paul Delbar
• Ivo Jansch, Lorna Mitchell, Felix De Vliegher and Harrie Verveer at IBuildings
• Jachim Coudenys and Jochen Vandendriessche at Guideline
• Filip Forrez and Jeroen Serpieters at Ausy
• Davide Mendolia
• Jeremy Coates
• And lots of other people I forgot to mention

See you next year

See you next year for phpbnl11 !