On this second day of the conference I attended the following sessions:

• Upgrade Your Development to Web 2.0, presented by Amy Hoy | slides here 
• Managing PHP Performance, presented by Ilia Alshanetsky | slides here 
• Rich User Interfaces with Ajax, presented by Gilbert Hyatt | slides here 

I loved Amy's presentation style: very real and human, but also demonstrative of comprehensive expertise. The subjects of her talk–RSS, APIs, and AJAX–are all high up on my list of latest passions, so I remained attentive throughout the session.

Ilia is an intense speaker–come ready to be educated! His Managing PHP Performance session touched on the many ways that you can optimize your PHP installation for maximum performance. Topics included caching and caching implementations, custom compiling, and using existing PHP functions rather than piecing functions together.

I really liked how Gilbert presented an overview of his talk first; that's something I really like in a presentation. I was excited by the content he was going to cover, but found myself drifting away during the talk's JavaScript syntax-heavy portion. I came to the realization that JavaScript syntax has never made much sense to me, and looking at it makes my eyes cross. I sat through about 2/3's of the talk, then retreated to my hotel room for some quiet time.

I missed Ilia's Advanced PHP Security talk, but I did pick up a copy of his new book, PHP Guide to Security.