The second day of the conference kicked off with a keynote by Brian Aker, the director of architecture for MySQL AB. Brian is an excellent speaker, and didn't let the problems with the projector distract him from his talk on scalable web architectures. As I have not worked on Amazon-sized projects before, a lot of this information was totally new to me and complex to grasp. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the learning curve. Brian has a couple of posts up about the conference, but it doesn't look like the slides from the keynote are up. There is one presentation PDF he links to, but that talk wasn't on the conference schedule, so I assume he also gave one of the "lightning talks", none of which I caught.

Next, I sat in on the Object Oriented Basics talk by UBC lecturer Jim O'Leary. This turned out to be a pleasure for me because it was the first time that I have ever felt "above" a conference talk. Typically, I find that a lot of conference talks soar above my level of knowledge–which is a good thing as I am constantly inspired to learn more–but in this case, I didn't learn anything new and when I realized it, I couldn't help but break a big, satisfied grin.

Mike Potter of Adobe gave the next talk I went to: Realizing the Full Potential of Your Rich Internet Applications. This talk was interesting on a technical level, but also on a business level as Mike revealed Adobe's intentions to develop a more open (as in "open source") culture at Adobe. Case in point: you wouldn't hear about Adobe working with an open source project like Amfphp (Flash remoting for PHP) just a couple of years ago, yet that's what's happening now. He discussed AJAX a little, and while he referenced Yahoo! UI Library and script.aculo.us he didn't bring up Adobe's own AJAX framework, Spry. When I asked him about this, he replied that Yahoo!'s library was probably the most advanced open source offering available, but that Spry is coming along and will be included with new editions of Dreamweaver. Mike also introduced us to Apollo, a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to build and deploy desktop RIA's. With Apollo, you can run a web application without a browser, plus the software has access to the local file system. He showed us a few demos that I was pretty impressed with. However, I'm also a little nervous that Apollo will end up bloated and slow like Adobe Reader. Watch for a Q4 public release.

For lunch, I headed to the Lennox Pub at the corner of Granville and Robson, and enjoyed an excellent cream of spinach soup and salad along with a crisp Hoegaarden. I rushed back to my hotel to refresh, which made me about 10 minutes late for the next talk…

James Walker of Bryght spoke on Drupal module development. James had a fairly monotone delivery, but the talk was interesting and engaging anyway. Along with the Drupal talk I attended on Day 1, this one left me pretty excited about deploying Drupal for an upcoming project.

The last talk I attended was Derick Rethans on rapid application development with eZcomponents. Derick is another excellent speaker: competent and engaging. While I'm falling for frameworks these days, the libraries at phpclasses.org, pear, and projects like eZcomponents also offer an attractive route to RAD, but without the stricter requirements of a framework. Derick walked us through many of the modules and it was clear that eZcomponents can provide a flexible foundation for a wide variety of web applications. [slides]

I met a number of interesting and friendly folks at this very well organized conference including Mustapha from Peragrin Systems, Malcolm from Magnetic Bubble and uberbabe.com, and Catherin, a QA tester for RavenNuke and a fellow member of the phpwomen.org community. It was also great to see Richard from Courtenay again! We met a couple of years ago at PHP West. Something I quite liked about this conference was the diversity among the attendees. There were more women and wider age range compared to conferences I've attended in the past. 

A HUGE thank you to the Vancouver PHP User Group and the volunteer organizing committee! The conference speakers and topics were well selected, as was the conference venue. The event ran smoothly, and the price was right. If I can voice one dissatisfaction, it would be this: coffee, tea and cookies for refreshments. (You know, I did see someone with a banana–did I simply not see the fruit at the snack table?) These conferences should try to do at least a small part at promoting healthier lifestyles to programmers, especially here in BC, Canada's healthiest province. Healthy programmers are happy programmers, and happy programmers are… well, so very good for the world!

After the close of the conference, I enjoyed a fun dinner at Stella: a tapas bar on Commercial Dr. with a very large selection of Belgian beers.

On the ferry ride back to Vancouver Island the next day, I did a little scripting on my laptop and thought about the all the new information I'd just absorbed at the conference. Every time I go to one of these events, I am able to retain more knowledge and I come home inspired to continue learning.

Flickr photos tagged "vancouverphpconference".