PHP UK Conference 2012

This was the third consecutive year I’ve attended the PHP UK conference. I bought a ticket for Friday only (this is the first year PHP UK has spanned two days). While I think the event is better organised every year, the quality of the talks for 2012, overall, was not the same standard as last year (with exception to Ian B’s, who’s always good).

This was the first year an unconference ran in parallel to the scheduled tracks. I wish I’d got to attend a few of the talks (Lean Scrum and BDD / Behat).

Three talks in (excluding the keynote), and I was beginning to question returning for a forth year. Fortunately the afternoon sessions were better, and the #phpscale forum at the end was a great addition to the conference.

In general the talks were high(er) level with less code / live walk throughs than previous years. I’m not sure if I preferred this, I think developers operate on details and want to see examples of implementation.

In vogue technologies that were mentioned in multiple talks and/or were carried through from last year’s conference: ZeroMQ, Elasticsearch, libsvm and Gearman.

I left feedback on joind.in for the talks I attended.

PHP in 2012 (keynote) – (4/5) (Talk also given at Etsy)
Big Data web – (2/5)
Data abstraction in large web apps – (3/5)
Creative coding – (3/5)
Distribute the workload – (4/5)
Teaching your machine to find fraudsters – (5/5)

I don’t know how talks are critiqued / selected at present but I’m sure if the talk had to be presented to the organisers, an audition if you like, this would boost the quality of the talks. Right now I’m leaning towards passing on next year’s conference, though a great schedule for 2013 could convert me.