Disclosure: Although I am a shameless promoter of the DCPHP Community, my only formal role is one of the three moderators on the mailing list. Other than being a member of the group, I have no title, investment, or financial/legal ties to any of the groups involved. I just believe firmly that success for the conference and the community means bigger success for the community... myself included on both sides of that equation.

Last week saw the third DCPHP Conference happen on George Washington University. This post covers the second day of the conference and was written after everything was done. The first day of coverage is available here: 2008 DCPHP Conference - Day 1.

Last week saw the third DCPHP Conference happen on George Washington University. This post covers the first day of the conference and was written after everything was done.

The opening keynote was from Kshemendra Paul, Chief Architect for the Office of Management and Budget Executive Office of the President, who talked about their attempt collaboration and coordination going on between the different Federal Agencies. While I found some of his discussion points and examples interesting, there weren't many Fed or govt-types in the audience this time around. In addition, he didn't bring slides, so the url's he shared were spelled out for all to write down. Wha? The dynamic duo from the State of Iowa - Michael Tutty and Tony Bibbs - were in attendance and shared some perspective and ideas, but it simply wasn't relevant to a good portion of the audience.

When the highly esteemed Zend'er Cal Evans was in DC earlier this week, a number of local DCPHP'ers met up with him for drinks.

One of the hottest topics we discussed was conferences. He - and much of the PHP Community on Twitter - are currently at php|tek in Chicago. Then we have the 2008 DCPHP Conference in less than two weeks. Then we have ZendCon 2008 in September.

And the question always comes up...

Why should I go to these conferences?

Well, they're fun.

But don't tell you boss that.

Can you feel it? It's coming...

Even after the glory that was SocialDevCamp, we have another DC local conference coming:

The 2008 DCPHP Conference

This is a real conference which means the agenda is set, the speakers have been determined, and the sponsors are coming.

The highlights:

While I am not the President or even have any official role in the DCPHP Developers' Group, I am one of the moderators on the mailing list. The list itself has really been alive and active as a place for discussions - as opposed to just announcements - for about 18 months.

It started off small with probably a half dozen people doing most of the talking. As other people realized that they could help others and had questions to ask, the traffic and number of voices grew. But about a year ago that I noticed something dangerous...

A few people had set themselves up as notoriously difficult to deal with or particularly clueless. Unfortunately, the tone of the list started to change. Instead of being the bright, intelligent people that some of us are known for being, the remarks started to get harsh and once in a while downright disrespectful.

This is the coverage of the first day of the 2007 DCPHP Conference. The Conference wrapped last week, so this is a bit more delayed than usual... Day 2 coverage will be online tomorrow.

The Opening Keynote was from Chris Shiftlett of OmniTI talking about Security 2.0. One of the things that was obvious was the high technical level of the crowd. The core concepts and concerns that he covered seemed like they were pretty well known and understood. Definitely a good sign. Some of the tips and tricks he demonstrated to test and combat the things were new and generated a number of questions and comments.

I skipped the first session of the day to tweak my presentation.

The next session was from Paul M Jones of OmniTI on Framework and Application Benchmarking (slides available here). He raised some solid points on the performance and ability of some of the popular frameworks and how to estimate the highest throughput of a given system. The single thing that I appreciated the most is that he made his entire methodology and the resulting data available. So if you don't believe his numbers, check them out yourself. The single best part is that none of the concepts were exclusive to PHP, so even if you're working with other technologies (like Rails), you can still apply the information.