Well, ZendCon has officially been done for a week... so what is there left to say that Ed Finkler, Travis Swicegood, Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Ivo Jansch, Michelangelo van Dam, Akeem Philbert, Anna Filina, Jason Austin, and Bradley Holt haven't said?

Well honestly, not much... so I'm going to do some quick hits and move on.

The Good

So, it's your first conference. Yes, it can be a little intimidating. Yes, it will be exciting. Yes, it will be exhausting. Here are some tips to get you started:

Do: Look at the schedule to find your "must see" sessions. Once the conference is running, you're going to be overwhelmed. If there's a session you absolutely need to attend, you need to figure that out now and plan accordingly.

Don't plan to attend every session. I know, I know... you want to "get your money's worth". You want to get exposed to every great new idea out there and you can't wait to dive in. First of all, no one can handle that much in a few days. Even the sharp guys over at North Carolina State University were overwhelmed at their first conference. Second of all, you can't forget the "Hallway Track".

Well somehow it got to be that time of year again... at present, we're less than two weeks from ZendCon 2009.  Odds are, if you're going, you've already booked your flight, bought your tickets, maybe even reviewed the schedule a couple times and marked your have to see sessions.

But odds are that you missed something:  Your session.

I know, I know.  Your session wasn't accepted this year - the competition was fierce - but you have one more shot in the ZendCon Uncon.

Around this time every year, something happens within the PHP community.  We come out of the lazy days of summer with focus and excitement.  It's due to a number of things - like kids going back to school - but  one of the biggest on the calendar is ZendCon.

While php|tek has a definite community or "friends getting together" vibe to it, ZendCon is definitely corporate.  It's reflected in the attitude, the clothing (lots of khakis and polos), and the formal exhibit hall, etc.  There are still numerous friends getting together, but what happens when you spice things up a bit?

<trumpet blast />

Earlier this week my friend and collaborateur Eli White announced the ZendCon 2009 Call for Papers (dislaimers below).  While ZendCon has gotten a little "enterprise-y" in the past with a heavy presence from IBM, Oracle, and similar companies, it looks like they're taking a different angle this year:

We are expanding this year’s conference to focus on the whole development team and lifecycle of your projects. We therefore are not only having sessions on ‘writing PHP code’, but are also emphasizing production processes, frameworks, management information, and the maintenance & tuning of servers.

In the past five years, I've seen the PHP community mature and grow in terms of tools, practices, and goals, so I think this is a natural progression.  Here is the topic information in detail: