ZendCon 2013

Last week I attended ZendCon 2013, a prominent PHP developer-oriented conference designed to give industry professionals information on tools, practices and trends which will help them deliver enterprise-class software to customers.  During the conference, many sponsors set up booths in order to demonstrate new products and services, and many industry professionals hold tutorials and sessions that attendees can attend in order to learn more about our trade.  The conference was held in Santa Clara, CA (about an hour south of San Francisco, just outside of San Jose) from October 7th through October 10th.

I spent a lot of time at the conference focusing on tutorials and sessions that I felt might provide the most value for our company, in order to deliver better, faster and more stable software for our clients.  One tutorial that I attended, for instance, focused entirely on best practices for implementing caching into software (and at the server level), and tuning settings in PHP, MySQL and Apache/NginX to deliver the highest possible performance. Another session I attended focused on Object-Oriented Javascript Programming and the future of Javascript (or, more specifically, ECMAScript 6).  By the very nature of the conference, all sessions were very technical in nature, so don't feel too bad if any of this sounds like Greek to you.  The point I want readers to take away is that we take our profession seriously, and IPS feels that an investment into continuing education is important for our clients.

I had the pleasure of meeting many industry professionals in the PHP world, including Andi Gutmans (CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies), Zeev Suraski (CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies), Elizabeth Smith (very active contributor to the PHP project and various PHP extensions), Derick Rethans (creator of XDebug, MongoDB PHP extension, and other PHP project contributions), John Coggeshall (active lead for the PHP Tidy extension) and many other wonderful contributors to the PHP ecosystem.  The passion that these people share for the products and services is just amazing, and serves as a great role model for developers everywhere.

I won't spend much time getting into the nitty gritty details of each session I attended.  Some were very technical in nature, while some focused on more abstract necessities of running a team of developers and managing day-to-day development duties (for example, discussing things like time management, gathering project requirements effectively, and so on).  All in all, every session I attended provided useful information that I feel we can make use of to better our processes and delivery of future software releases.

As I said, here at IPS we take our profession very seriously.  We will always strive to deliver the best possible software, and are thankful for the contributions of our third party developer community as well as the rest of our clients, whom provide us with bug reports and feedback that help to improve our products.  We have many exciting things in store in the coming months, so stay tuned by subscribing to our company blog to be notified of changes and updates.

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