I spend the past week in florida. First visiting my parents and then spending time at php|tek where I was invited to give two talks. I was quite nervous about the first talk about "database schema deployment". My original intention was to create a working solution to handle scripting the necessary DDL and DML statements to manage schema updates. However while researching the topic I found that its even less trivial than I expected. So during my talk I was mainly giving some basic ideas along with a number of ideas to explore depending on the needs. For example if all you care about is generating DDL then things are quite simple. In the past MySQL indirectly benefited from the simplicity of the database but with foreign keys, views, stored procedures and triggers even generating DDL is not entirely trivial anymore. If you also need DML then things get instantly more complex.
My second talk "beyond SQL" went fairly smooth, although I kind of suffered from the lack of a flip chart to draw on. I really need to sit down and draw some diagrams to include in my slides. The talk was essentially a stripped down version of my "fast, portable, SQL" talk. However I did not strip it down enough so I was short on time. I was talking to a mostly MySQL using crowd so I ended up giving a lot of MySQL specific advice.
Aside from that the conference was great fun. The hotel was fairly expensive and charged for everything separately on top of that. But the service was good and the location was pretty nice as well. Though I am not really fond of hotels around airports. I picked up a lot of goodies too. I got the usual, but more sturdy looking than common, conference bag which included a book on PHP. Since my parents had dropped me off at the conference I gave them the bag to give to my sister and my father got the book on PHP (he is coding in Java mostly .. but I will give him some web space on my server to play with PHP). Everybody got a t-shirt as well, but only speakers got a nice little toy. Essentially its a laser pointer that also includes a little infrared dongle that allows you to control some basic navigations from this little wireless device. Great for presentations. Unfortunately the wood stands for the laptops in the presentation rooms extended 10 cm above the main surface so it was non trivial to make proper use of the infrared connection. Finally I managed to score an iPod Video 30GB at the pool party sponsored by the Useful. I had to down a shot of tequila in order to get it though. Everybody as quite shocked that I actually did it, since I usually do not drink any alcohol. But since I drank a lot of water afterwards I luckily did not feel any bad after effects.
Oh I almost forgot. I also participated in a panel discussion where I represented PEAR. This also gave me an opportunity to make it clear that I personally hate Exceptions even though PEAR does mandate them for PHP5 only packages. A podcast of the discussion should be available soon on pro php podcast. Finally I also sat down with Andi from Zend. I congratulated him on moving Zend Framework to a standard BSD license. Its very good that Zend listened to community concerns. We also talked about their Eclipse project. Like I said in my last post on this I now understand the approach of the Eclipse project better though I still think that its important that the community stay critical of projects like this. At least until they do fulfill on the stated intention of the Eclipse project of community collaboration.
I spend the final day with Derick, Illia and Marcus on a quick trip to Kennedy Space Center. We were kind of surprised to find out that there is too much to do there to really get done in a day. So we never made it to the Simulators. The way back way slightly exciting as I had to catch my flight in the evening but the highways were blocked due to a fire in the area. I made it to the airport just as they were closing down the counter.
Great to see you again, Lukas. Thanks for the ZF license chat, and awesome job with the tequila shot! :-)
Thanks for the talks Lukas, I really learned a lot. Next time there's a shootout with the little flags, you had better watch out!
