Recap of ZendCon 09

Wow! Has it already been nearly a week since ZendCon wrapped up?! Time is flying right now, and with IPC and the holidays right around the corner, I don't see it getting any less hectic.

ZendCon was fun. This was my first time attending/presenting this particular conference. It had a distinctly different feel too it than the conferences put on by Marco and company. ZC felt more corporate than tek does, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We tend to forget that if it weren't for the business interests at play none of us would have jobs.

I made it to only a handful of talks, but everything I attended was top-notch. I'd highly recommend checking out Josh Holmes' The Lost Art of Simplicity talk. He presented it in the uncon, but accept it as a keynote if he submits it to your conference.

Speaking of Microsoft (Josh works for them) they stepped up in a huge way Wednesday night. The topic of what to do after the Ask Zend session that night and the idea of heading up to San Francisco came up. Josh jumped into gear and not only got us into the Bing party that was going on in conjunction with Web 2.0, but also scored us all copies of Windows 7 and a party bus to get us there and back!

Microsoft catches a lot of crap from the open-source community, some of it warranted, but they're heading in the right direction as long as they keep hiring guys like Josh and making them the face of Microsoft. The company will have no choice to change if it's made up guys who are really taking the blue monster to heart.

The cynic in me has to ask if this isn't just a long-view version of embrace, extend, and extinguish via slowly causing liver failure in the main contributors to open source! :-D

I also finally got a Fork You shirt from the guys over at GitHub. I'm thinking of forking the shirt design and updating it to say:

Fork Me

On the Git front, I might have made Elizabeth M. Smith mad enough at the state of the current Git Windows tools to actually do something about it. She started hacking a bit on it at the conference, and I'm sure we'll see something by the end of the year (right, Liz?).

Next up for me (and my final conference of 2009) is the International PHP Conference in Germany. I'll be giving a talk titled Building Real-Time Applications using XMPP. Meg is tagging along and we're going to see some of southern Germany after the conference. Definitely looking forward to the time off on another continent.