PHP North West 2009

An excellent day for me and I learned a lot.

I am only a hobbiest when it comes to PHP and web development at the moment so I was a little worried a lot of the talks would be beyond what I am likely to experience [or go completely over my head]. However, all the talks were insightful, well presented and for the most part relevant to a lot of programming in general, not just for the web.

The catering and services staff at the Manchester Conference Centre were fantastic and eager to help. The food was also very good!

It was a fantastic day and I urge anyone remotely interested in PHP or web development to attend next years conference!

Great talks, Great people, Great food, Great Beer!

Very well organized, and I can't wait till next year!

There is nowhere to comment on the Microsoft Primary sponsors address so I think I will do it here.

Before we start I think it was game of Microsoft to turn up. I had a number of interesting talks with them on their stand, the talks were polite and respectful and I feel both they and I learned something about each other.

Unfortunately the talk they chose to go with did not feel to be aimed at the audience sitting in front of them. Rob Allen had already done one talk giving a developers view of moving into project managing the delivery of a web site. Some in the audience found it great some were looking for their tech fix and not getting it.
The Microsoft talk effectively re-visited a sub-section of Rob’s talk, usability and client acceptance and promised it would all be solved with a new Microsoft tool. Yes there was some interesting stuff. The layout version of Lorum Ipsum and how stops you getting dragged into the detail too early could have been interesting, but unfortunately a chunk of the talk missed the audience.

Few of the people in front of them were ever going to be using the tool on show and few if any were going to use visual studio to make use of the output. There were also some minor classics such as referring to free tools that come bundled with your $1000 of software suite, in this context free fails both the GNU definition and the normal coins in my wallet definition making it sound a bit like a “Not only do you get the 3 sharp knives but the peeler too” pitch. In addition the tool was to fix a problem of their own creation – non standards based rendering of HTML.

The choice of the talk was unfortunate when there was so much they had that the audience would have cared about.

How they worked to get php on iis and the detail on the iis v’s apache speed trials would have been great

Or Silverlight / moonlight cross browser and cross platform plug ins.

In short it was great to see them. I support 50 MS client OS machines from a SAMBA PDC and had some good conversations with them. Pity about the talk they went with but everyone gets the odd learning experience and the audience was always going to be a tough sell.

PS Great conference

Great food - it has to be said! As a veggie I always worry but there was no need here.

Good venue - but really would benefit from having many many more plug sockets!

Well organised conference, I got alot out of this from both the presentations and the people I met there.
Would love to have attended the socials - maybe next year.
This wasnt just a php conference but covered alot of web development thats applicable to many other platforms ( I think I only attended one pres that was exclusively PHP) - why not broaden the offering a little so its not just PHP devs who think about attending?
Excellent work again from all the volunteers - respect!