Maggie Nelson

Friday was much more laid back than Thursday. I started the day by going to Sarah Golemon’s PHP::$unicode->i18n() where she lamented how Andrei Zmievski stole some her presentation ideas in his keynote the day before. PHP 6 will be awesome – y’all just wait!
Afterward, I presented How to Optimize a Database Query. Since I can’t install Oracle on my MacBook without resolving to crazy virtual machine shennenigans, I was depending on a remote Oracle install for my presentation to show the audience some cool, live explain plans. I set everything up perfectly, so obviously right before I started my wifi connection dropped and I had to reset everything up. I think this worked in my favor though because I got to ask the people in the room about their database habits. I felt more comfortable in this presentation because in the end, it’s just talking about code – something I do every day. I was asked some really good questions about optimization. I am compiling them right now into a separate blog post, which will be a part of my series of posts about optimization.
Lunch was delicious. First after lunch was Framework and Application Benchmarking by Paul Jones. He brought up some valid points, especially the one that when people sometimes look at frameworks, they tend to clump them together in one pile, while they can take some pretty drastic approaches. When benchmarking frameworks, at least compare them by similar approaches.
Terry Chay was hilarious in his presentation “The Internet Is an Ogre”. I can’t say much about his presentation other than if you weren’t there, it’s your loss. (Oh, and Ruby sux!)
Chris Jones showed some of the new stuff coming down the pipe for Oracle in regards to the new 11g edition. The interesting part about his both presentations (and perhaps a little ironic for a PHP conference) is that what I have learned in them can directly help with some problems I have yet to figure out on a current project at work. Social networking sites is about data, and what better than databases to handle your data-related issues?
My flight was delayed, so I got to stay for Andrei’s VIM for (PHP) Programmers. It’s always good to pick up some new vim tricks (as there are a billion to choose from…)
Marco Tabini closed the conference with a [closed captioned] keynote. The closed captioning was done by the audience without his knowledge, leading to hilarious results. i’m in ur slidez, eatin ur browniez!
Overall, php|works was pretty great. It was especially nice to finally put some faces to the #phpc personas. And most importantly (even though it does sound kind of boring), I have learned some new things that I can apply directly to my work. Yay!