This is part of my coverage of ZendCon07. If you'd like to read the entire coverage, it is available here: Day 0 - Tutorials, Day 1 - Part 1, Day 1 - Part 2, Day 2, and Day 3. In addition, my presentation from Day 1 is available here. This post will probably be updated once pictures are available from Flickr.

The opening keynote this morning was "Stay Free! How Open Source Affects Culture" from Corey Doctorow... without goggles and cape. His thesis revolved around the idea that geeks are remaking the world and that copying/sharing information is never going to be more difficult than it is now. He used numerous examples of how some information - such as the DVD key - seems like a good idea to protect but then you have to protect a random number... which supposedly is copyrighted/trade secret... but it's still a random number. The entire point of his presentation was that it's kind of odd/silly that something that you purchased - that you own - is limiting your abilities and keeping secrets from you. Even worse is the concept that your equipment and software is sharing information on you at the same time... It was a solid presentation but probably raised more questions than it answered.

This is coverage of Day 2 of ZendCon07. Previous days coverage are here - Day 0 Tutorials, Day 1 Part 1, Day 1 Part 2 - and my presentation given on Day 1 is available here. This post will likely be updated with photos once I dive into the Flickr steam.

The opening keynote of the day was from Lee Brimelow from Adobe demo'ing Flex and some other nifty toys. He showed off a few live demos and live applications that are out there including Google Finance and Buzzword. But more than anything, he focused on using Flex on the frontend to wrap a PHP backend and how they can play nicely together. Just a few years ago, the message seemed to be that Flash was The Way and we ended up with an entire generation of entirely Flash websites... and their creators went into hiding ala the humans in Terminator. Obviously since Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, something fundamental changed in their message and it's good to hear a more pragmatic approach.

This is the second half of coverage of Day 1 of ZendCon 2007. The tutorials day is covered here - ZendCon Day 0 and the ZendCon Day 1, Part 1.

The first real session of the day was from Terry Chay on "Finding Art in the Internet". In the opening, he warned us of his swearing, so I decided to keep an f-bomb count. And then be began quoting himself and showed definitive proof on how he killed Ruby. After a while he focused on some of the core of the presentation and dove into the differences between complexity versus complex and simplicity versus simple. The best phrase he dropped was the distinction between viral marketing and word of mouth marketing - a major argument at BarCampDC - "Viral marketing is when users using your system bring in more users. Anything else is Word of Mouth Marketing sh*t." and used differential equations to describe and demonstrate what happens with Viral Marketing... k > 0.

All slides are Creative Commons licensed.... give me credit, modify as needed, you can't use them commercially.

If you caught my presentation at ZendCon 2007 (09 Oct 2007), you're probably here looking for my slides. You can download them from the Events page.

If you didn't catch my presentation and think it might be interesting to you... it will be, don't worry. Here's the synopsis:

Usually when we think of rebuilding an application, the first step is to start from a clean slate... losing the lessons we've learned before. Fortunately, we have an alternative. By using tools like the ZendFramework, Smarty, and your favorite Ajax library, you can bring even the most boring application up to date and implement completely new functionality quickly with minimal disruption.

Today begins my coverage of ZendCon 2007. This is the first entry and covers Day 0... the Tutorials.

Today started with a $4 muffin. As the first day of festivities but not yet the conference, breakfast was not available. Hence, the muffin and a flock of slightly annoyed geeks.

When I checked in at the registration desk, I got one of the best surprises so far. Last year Zend put together a deck of cards featuring prominent PHP'ers. This year they got even more creative went with trading cards featuring the speakers and other prominent PHP'ers. I happen to be one of them... BarCampDC was the first time seeing CaseySoftware, LLC on shirt, this is the first time seeing myself on a card. Sounds odd but kind of fun. I'll attach the card once they're available online.

The tutorials were an extended format. Two three hour sessions with a deep focus on a single topic. There was the standard Zend Certified Engineer Crash Course by Chrisitan Wenz, an Extending PHP session given by Wez Furlong and Sara Goleman, a Security Crash Course by John Coggeshall, and finally PHP Development Best Practices by Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Mike Naberezny, and Sebastian Bergman. I attend that last one last year, so I opted for the Security Crash Course.