In the next couple months, the conference schedule gets tight once again, but it's going to be so good. So, so good. At the time of this writing (27 Sept), the registration for all three events is still open.
First on the agenda is ZendCon 2007 (08 – 11 Oct) hosted in Burlingame, CA, just a few miles from the San Francisco Airport (SFO). I'm giving the first of my new presentations entitled "The Bionic App". Here's the summary:
We can rebuild it, we have the technology. 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.
The real core of this presentation came about through my work on both dotProject and the mobile platform that I built for FoxNews Mobile over the past year or so. I found myself surrounded by a sea of legacy code that needed cleanup and modification to move to a new level of usefulness. This presentation looks at some of the strategies I used and continue to use in these efforts.
The presenter list is once again extensive and includes Terry Chay, Cory Doctorow, Chris Shiflett, Joel Spolsky, and Eli White.. with sponsors ranging from Microsoft to Oracle to Zend. The big question is: Will Cory wear his googles and cape?
Immediately after that is BarCamp Milwaukee2, organized by the highly esteemed Pete Prodoehl of RasterWeb including a few key people like Mike Rhode* of Rohdesigns. They have room for 250 people and sessions covering topics from Angel funding all the way to setting up your own Asterisk system. I looked into attending this one on the way back from ZendCon but United doesn't consider a 24 hour delay a "layover". They consider it a second trip.
* Disclaimer: Mike Rhode designed the CaseySoftware logo.
Finally, we have the DCPHP Conference (7 – 9 November) hosted at George Washington University in downtown DC. This is where I'm giving my second new presentation "Implementing REST Webservices":
REST can be a simple and flexible way to share information between applications and organizations. This presentation will give an overview on how to analyze an existing applications' usage patterns to determine where REST makes sense and then provide tricks and tactics on implementing it using Amazon's S3 as an example.
This is a followup to my presentation last year on why REST is good and was inspired by some work I'm currently doing with Amazon's infrastructure. It includes some useful code snippets and shares some tips and tricks I've learned along the way. It's not quite hands on, but a grounding in the concepts will be very handy.
This presenter list is interesting… there are a few staple presenters like Damien Seguy, Mike Ho and Eli White but then there is a significant Facebook presence. With the recent rise and usage of Facebook in politics, I suspect this is a sign of things to come.