ConFoo 2011
7 - 12 Mar 2011 at Hilton Montreal Bonaventure

FMaz,
It was basically about how to use a kernel module to log events.

«Kill Bottlenecks with Gearman, Memcached & Sphinx» from Paul was really instructing. He didn't really explained the way these software work but provided us with a good overview of how you can use them to reduce load and bottlenecks, where and how you should use them and how you can combine themselves. A really nice talk with a few anecdotes about his past. I will definitely look more into Gearman (job queuing software) and Sphinx (real-time full text search) in the future. Best talk of the day for me.

«Pragmatic Guide to Git» was a very straightforward conference by a cool guy who seemed to know about his stuff. Git seems like a good compromise to Subversion, kind of «social version control» instead of «one to rule them all» but the learning curve is quite steep for beginners, it seems it would be harder to maintain over time in a company and according to the presenter there is no Windows implementation nor any GUI to use it... problem is, it seems there are:

Windows: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
Linux: http://www.rabbitvcs.org
OSX: http://www.git-tower.com

I found that «Introducing TDD to your project» felt like a university class where professors tells you a lot about how awesome it is and why you should use it, but not really how in a practical way and more importantly in real life in a real company confronting real managers. Seemed a bit like hippie talk to me «this is awesome so if you're not using it, you're doomed». But nonetheless, interesting stuff about continuous integration, unit tests and how you should start writing tests even before coding. Seems a bit extreme to me, but why not... I prefer my way of doing things or at least integrating unit tests but only after the code is done. All in all, interesting talk.

We learned we should use load balancers and CDNs to scale... yaaay. Not really a surprise. I guess I should have payed more attention to the «101» in the talk title but we were a lot to have been fooled. I guess it was okay for beginners.

«Audit statique PHP» was some French dude who wrote a PHP parser to analyze code for defects (unused parameters, mismatching coding conventions, dead code and stuff like that) ans see how it «looks» from outside the box.

It was entertaining but not really useful «as is» I guess. It *highly* depends on your coding style and standards and it looked like his version was only able to understand his preferences and that a lot of advanced PHP features were just ignored (like callbacks, dymanic variables and stuff).

You can't really blame it on the author for sure, it would be a nightmare to implement, but the whole thing then becomes quite useless for me because it doesn't support my way of doing things.

Why the best talker doesn't show here his slides?
great show :)

Excellent talk! Very nice proof of concept focusing on PHP and PHP-GTK portability. This is not a knowledge I will use in my every day job, but it was still one of the best talks in Confoo 2011.
Thanks!

Informative and enjoyable talk about YellowAPI focused on both iPhone and Android apps. I think it could have been a little bit more technical as the provided examples were basically showing us how to retrieve a JSON feed. The business part of this talk was very interesting.

Good presentation. It was lacking a bit of enthusiasm, but the points and the many reasons behind this technology were very interesting. Manos looks very promising, especially if a community would gather around it.