International PHP Conference 2005: it’s over

Yesterday, the International PHP Conference 2005 closed its doors. So far,
it was very nice to see all the people again and have some good time. Luckily, there was enough free beer at the VIP
Reception and the PHP Lounge. :-) This year, we introduced some new events:

The Management Day: you know, attendees usually are not only the smaller or mid-sized companies. Mostly, companies
like Deutsche Telekom, Siemens and other companies send 3-10 people from their department to this Conference to catch
up with the latest hot development in the PHP scene. This year, we tried to provide a separate day fully dedicated to the
topic „PHP in the Enterprise“. I think we pretty much succeeded. We invited companies like T-Online (a subsidiary company of
Deutsche Telekom), HypoVereinsbank (one of Europe’s largest banks), Pangora GmbH (a subsidiary company of Lycos Europe),
EurotaxxGlass’s (they publish the well-known Schwacke book for used cars) and Amadeus Fire AG to let them talk about their
usage of PHP (or better, the LAMP stack because some heavily rely at their core on PHP+MySQL) in their company and how
they think that PHP fulfills their needs and where PHP has to improve. At the beginning of this day and as this day was only
in German language, I provided a renewal of my talk „10 years of PHP and MySQL in Germany“ (which I gave at LinuxTag) where
I provided a closer look into how the PHP business here in Germany has been developing in the last 7 years and what will perhaps
follow in the next years. After the company sessions, the Management Day closed with a discussion panel and some sponsored
free drinks and food (by my company).

PHP Code Camp: Software&Support and I had the following question which led to the PHP Code Camp: „How can we give the people/community an understanding of how you write a PHP extension in C?“. Thanks to Marcus Börger, Johannes Schlüter, Derick
Rethans and Ilia Alshanetsky the attendees could learn how to write a PHP extension. From what I have heard, the PHP Code Camp (which started at 4.30 pm and ended around 9 pm with some free beer and pizza) was pretty well perceived, and I hope that we will
repeat that next year. Thanks again to Marcus, Johannes, Derick and Ilia for supporting this event.

Can anyone remember the nice girls from Brazil back in 2003? Well, we replaced the girls with the PHP Lounge where we set up an environment with a bunch of sockets, free beer, nice music and some of the PHP pros acting as coaches where you could discuss the PHP problems you might have been experiencing in your company and talking about your current projects. I joined the PHP lounge together with some CIO of a department of S**mens (he’s been attending the Conference for years and I really enjoy talking with him about his latest projects), drinking some beer and talking with some guys from Intergenia about bug and request tracking, CVSSpam and Scrum.

Finally, my company was a silver sponsor at this Conference, having our own booth (where you could win two iPod shuffles – congrats to Dirk and Arne!) and providing free PHP5 posters, PHP stickers and ThinkPHP lenyards for special persons (kudos Zeev). :-) We did not
only provide those dogfood for community, but also presented our commercial services. Of course, this year we also provided exhibition booths for OpenSource projects like Hardened PHP, Horde and others.

It was a great pleasure for me to meet Zeev, Marcus, Derick and all the others again and I hope that we’ll see again next year!
Thanks to Sebastian for setting up a Flickr group of the International PHP Conference.
Follow the HOWTO and add
your photos from the Conference there. :-)

This year we were giving some sessions (/me with „100,000 SQLite installations – lessons learned“, „WebServices with PHP5“ and
Alex Aulbach about MySQL Cluster). We’ll post the slides soon on this blog, so stay tuned.