Both of these talks are new for me, so it has been quite a lot of fun putting things together. I hope you will come out and join me and others of the PHP Community at Tek. If you haven’t registered for it yet, there is still time. So get out there!

And if you know someone who is one of the unsung members of the PHP Community, be sure to nominate them for an interview at http://voicesoftheelephpant.com/nominate-a-voice/

I will be giving a tutorial on the basics of optimizing MySQL along with a session on character sets. I, in particular, look forward to the tutorial since it covers areas that I find fascinating – query and server optimization.

On a personal note, neither I or my husband have ever been to Amsterdam before. So since we have never yet had the opportunity to play tourist there, my husband plans to join me on the trip for the conference. We hope to play tourist while there and at least see the Van Gogh museum. Though hopefully we will get to see much more then just that.

This year it will be Saturday, April 2, 2011 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm at:

Wall St. Cantina
19 N Orange Ave
Orlando, FL 32801

Not sure if I will present yet.. But thinking about it.

Day 1:
- Documents, documents, documents by Matthew Weier O’Phinney. I particularly enjoyed that this was focused on the software architectural design and was system agnostic for the document database.
- Technical Debt by Elizabeth Naramore. Her no nonsense discussion and interaction with the audience kept this discussion interesting and engaging. The ideas and concepts discussed were something that every developer and manager should understand.
- Demystifying PostgreSQL by Asher Snyder. I have been wanting to look at PostgreSQL for years, I just never seem to have the time to do it. This was a nice intro to the system and its capabilities which I have to admit, are pretty dang cool.

Day 2:
- EXPLAIN – yeah it was my own talk, but hey – I was there!
- Pragmatic Guide to Git by Travis Swicegood Travis is a gifted speaker that manages to draw you in with his enthusiasm. His clear logical walk through of the basics of Git covers all the commands that a beginner will need.
- Infobright DB by Jeff Kibler This was a talk that I originally went to mostly out of curiosity. Once they started I found myself highly interested (data warehousing and mining is an interest of mine) not just for what they did – but how they did it.
- Welcome to the Dark Side: We have Brownies by Josh Holmes. The talk was informative, engaging, and just all around fun. Turns out Microsoft isn’t so bad after all… I mean – they had brownies even

Day 3:
Umm – slept late and then just practiced my last talk… Since it was on the last set of talks on the last day..

Missed a number of keynotes – did some volunteer work manning the PHP Community booth, but really enjoyed the “Dries” and “ROI” ones.

The various parties/after-parties (official and otherwise) were awesome with more then a few hangovers showing up the next day.

And as a minor side note – I also really enjoyed the Running MySQL at Scale tech talk at Facebook while I was there. Learned quite a bit and also got to see Domas again. I missed his brand of craziness.

I have to admit that I am very rusty with my PHP, which is why I wanted to sit in on the ZCE Bootcamp. I figured if anything the bootcamp would at least remind me of all that I have forgotten – and it did… it was scary how much I have forgotten. Christian did a fantastic job, keeping what could have been bland, boring information interesting and engaging. He has some real brain ticklers in his deck that more then showed me how much I have lost. If you are thinking of going for your ZCE – I can not recommend his tutorials enough.

Afterwards I eventually made it to the Speakers dinner and again had a great time talking to old and new friends. Had some fantastic talks through the night from the technical to the personal (Michelangelo, I promise I will keep thinking about what you said).

Unfortunately the timezone changes caught up with me so went up to bed at about 9PM (midnight my time). I always forget how much the time differences can take out of you.

So to try and improve myself on all those “soft skills” that I either don’t have or never thought I needed, I will be attending the Day Camp for Developers online conference.

It is a technology agnostic, inexpensive (only $35), one day (Saturday, November 6th), online event. Check it out!

The conference started out with the typical day 0 – Tutorials Day. I only attended the MongoDB talk mostly to learn a bit about it. Kristina was a wonderful speaker who really knew her stuff. And as a MySQL geek, I have to admit that it was interesting seeing seeing my world (RDBMS world) from a different perspective. I even managed not to say a single thing throughout the entire talk though there were a couple of times the others I was with had fun laughing at me holding back.

The first actual day of the conference started out with Josh Holmes keynote on The Lost Art of Simplicity. It was a fabulous talk that forced me to find myself on the wrong side more then once.

From there I went to Eli White’s talk on Anti-Spam and Anti-Gaming. The talk again was extremely interesting and some of his ideas would never of occurred to me. Good thing we have Eli to teach me.

On to Joel Perras’s talk on Graphs, Edges, and Nodes. Again a fabulous talk, that I have to admit – lost me a bit. But it is something I definitely want to learn more about.

From there to Large Scale Systems with David Strauss. This was one of the best talks I will be in at the conference. Learned lots – most of which I did not know enough to ask about… but I do now.

After that I kinda got into practicing for my own presentations and missed a lot in the actual sessions, but still enjoyed the hallway track. I must admit that it has been quite a while since I attended that many sessions at a conference, and all of them top notch talks.

As for my own talks, I thought they went well and seem to be well received. You can find the slides for my talks on my Presentations page.

So to wrap up I had a fabulous time at the conference, learning lots and hopefully teaching others stuff they did not know. I can’t wait for next years.

The conference this year will be held from May 18-21 at the Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare (same as the past couple of years). If you have already been to the conference, you already know about playing Tek frogger – and if you don’t or this is your first conference – be sure to find me at the conference so we can discuss it as we sit and have a drink at “Shirtless Slim’s”.

For those that are interested I will be giving 2 talks on MySQL this year. One will be an introduction to MySQL replication and the other will go over the new features found in MySQL 5.5. Both are new talks for me, so I am rather excited about speaking on the subjects and would love feedback.

I hope to see you there!

While there I will also be presenting 2 talks on MySQL – one on MySQL server tuning and the other on EXPLAIN. I admit it – I love MySQL optimization. If you do too, be sure to join me though I am admittedly.. kinda upset that I will be opposite Lorna‘s talk on using and understanding open source communities. That was one talk I wanted to attend myself. If I am lucky she will let me look over her slides afterwards