--- 
canonical: 'https://mwop.net/blog/146-ZendCon-is-over-at-last.html'
title: 'ZendCon is over at last'
author: "[Matthew Weier O'Phinney](https://mwop.net)"
created: '2007-10-11T20:50:47-05:00'
updated: '2007-10-18T03:19:41-05:00'
tags:
  - conferences
  - php
  - zendcon
  - zend-framework

---
[ZendCon '07](http://www.zendcon.com/) is finally over, the dust has settled,
and I finally find myself with some time alone… practically the first I've had
since Sunday. The week was fantastic, and I had many good conversations and
brainstorming sessions. Oh, and I ended up giving three different sessions, so
it's time for links to slides and materials:

- [Best Practices of PHP Development](/uploads/2007-ZendCon-BestPractices.odp).
  [Sebastian](http://sebastian-bergmann.de/), [Mike](http://mikenaberezny.com/),
  and I presented a full-day tutorial on PHP development best practices,
  focussing primarily on testing and testing strategies, but also covering
  coding standards, usage of SCM tools, and deployment. There were a ton of
  questions from the attendees, and Sebastian even whipped out some extra slides
  at the end showing new and little-known features of PHPUnit. Basically,
  reading the slides won't really indicate what we covered, but is more of a
  general outline. It was an honor and pleasure to work with Sebastian and Mike
  on this, and I hope we can do it again in the future some time.
- [Zend Framework MVC Quick Start](/uploads/2007-ZendCon-MVC.ppt). This was
  basically the same session I did in my [webinar](http://www.zend.com/webinar)
  a couple weeks ago, with a few corrections and a small demonstration. Cal put
  me on directly following [Terry Chay](http://terrychay.com/blog), in the
  largest of the four session rooms — the one where all the keynotes occurred
  — talk about intimidating! Amazingly, the session was really well attended —
  others I talked to estimate between 100 and 150 people showed up. The most
  amazing part, though, was that when I asked how many people knew what 'MVC'
  was, I don't think there was a single person who didn't raise their hand —
  definitely a sign of how well accepted the pattern now is in PHP.
- [AJAX-Enabling Your Zend Framework Controllers](/uploads/2007-ZendCon-AjaxPresentation.odp).
  I did this talk for the [Unconference](http://www.zendcon.com/wiki/index.php?title=Uncon),
  mainly because its a topic I've been interested in and wanted to present. In
  it, I detailed how to ajax-enable an application through some easy tricks with
  Action and View Helpers and using JS to decorate your existing application.
  The reference app I used was a pastebin, and I've got code for both
  [Dojo](http://dojotoolkit.org) and [Prototype](http://prototypejs.org) flavors
  available:
  - [Dojo pastebin](/uploads/PastebinDojo.tar.gz)
  - [Prototype pastebin](/uploads/PastebinPrototype.tar.gz)

The two highlight keynote speakers, for me, were definitely [Joel Spolsky](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)
and [Cory Doctorow](http://craphound.com/). Neither spoke about PHP, but both
spoke about topics that PHP developers should take to heart. Perhaps I'll
elaborate on those in another post.

Another bonus for me was the number of old and new friends alike I got to see —
I had many good conversations with Paul M. Jones, Nate Abele, Ivo Jansch, and
Ralph Schindler, and opportunities to finally meet fellow co-author Lig
Turmelle, Ben Ramsey, Chris Shifflet (dude, we've been to four conferences
together, and never yet met!), and many, many others. I was also overwhelmed by
the number of Zend Framework users who sought me out either to ask me questions
or simply thank me and the others on the team for the project; I'm deeply
honored that I can work on a project that affects so many developers.

And now for some down time to recuperate…