I really enjoyed this first day of the php | works conference! The day started with a good keynote by Rasmus Lerdorf. Some of the notes I took included: "key in the creation of PHP was flexibility", "common criticism of PHP is based on the fact that some developers stray from good programming logic because of this flexibility (this is a failure of the programmer, not the language)",  "fail fast, fail cheap, be lazy! due to PHP's comparitive ease of use it's easy to fail quickly, which means that you will arrive at a proper solution faster than you would with a more complex language or strict framework".

Next up was Chris Shiflett's 2 part session, Hands on PHP. Chris reviewed the basics of PHP code structure (variables, operators, control structures, strings, arrays) and accompanied this with five exercises. My compadre for the conference, Kalan MacCrow, took over at the helm of my laptop and coded up the examples while I absorbed via osmosis.

Lunch followed, then a quick fresh up in my hotel room. I attended Wez Furlong's PHP Streams talk next, most of which was a bit over my head, but I picked up a few new things.

The final session of the day for me was Paul Reinheimer's REST talk. Paul's presentation style was a slightly less polished than the other presenters, but this didn't matter to me. I found the talk informative and very relevant, since I've been diving into APIs more of late. 

Davey Shafik attended some of the talks I didn't, so head over to his blog for more info about those. 

All in all, an excellent day of talks, and day 2 looks great too! Session choices will be a bit harder for me tomorrow; there are a few running concurrently that I'd like to be at. I can't be two places at once, so perhaps Kalan and I will split up to cover the bases.

Speaking of bases… I'm off to see the Jays and Red Sox! David "Boomer" Wells is on the mound for Boston. I plan on being rowdy.