So, I'm out of touch...deliberately. Now I hear (on the grapevine) that Yahoo is losing a lot of money and all the employees are fleeing (the sinking ship). Which explains the "1 drink only" situation last night at the Yahoo/Zendcon party, compared with the "drink free all night" which they had last year.
I'm listening to the session "What's new in PHP 5.3" which is interesting, but the situation is the same as I've noticed everyday - a lot of people typing away on their computers, playing with their phones, and basically not listening to the presenter (four sitting up on a table in this session). Of course that's not a reflection of the conference organisers, but it does reflect on the presentations many of which haven't been that well presented, even if the content has been interesting.
I just bought the beta pdf of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition today while I was at Zendcon 2008. What does that tell you?
We had a keynote today by Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian about the current state of Ajax. This was a standout talk and my highlight of zendcon08. He is an excellent presenter, not just by having great slides/animations, but by his descriptions which where only technical where required. He also had an excellent structure and pacing to his presentation.
The content was very interesting. In summary he believes a new wave of desktop-like applications on the browser is upon us.
Zendcon 2008 has been an interesting experience. Stephen and I attended the "how to pass the zend certification exam" tutorial on Monday, only to find out that all of the sessions were filled. Our plan was to attend the tutorial then decide whether to do the exam Tuesday or Wednesday. In the end we would have done it Tuesday because the tutorial confirmed we weren't too far from ready. But it was a great disappointment when Zend announced there would be no more sessions. We came from Australia, and we were sent because there was a certification attached to the conference. I doubt they will pay for anyone to come again.
The sessions on the first day were mixed. Not so good in the morning, but much better in the afternoon, especially Paul Reinheimer talking about Ajax apps and allowing the browser back button to work as expected. He was an excellent presenter and it was an interesting topic. The last session of the day was by Derick Rethans who discussed Test Driven Development. Not a great presenter (but English is not his first language) but really interesting content, and provided a lot to consider when trying to get work to use TDD.
Zendcon 2008.