t0dd.net

ZendCon Recap

by todd on 05/11/07 at 11:11 pm

After thinking about it for a few days I’ve revised my opinion somewhat about ZendCon. I’m still vaguely disappointed but after getting some sleep I’m not -quite- as depressed about it. Some things were good, some things were not so good and some things were just bad.

Cal Evans The man is a machine. I can’t even begin to imagine how unbelievably complicated it must be to put something together like this. Zend may have a new CEO and there were great celebrity keynotes but Cal is the face of ZendCon, and we all know it.

KB Conferences They handled all the details invisibly. Done right you’ll never notice, done wrong it’s all you talk about. Thankfully they did everything right.

Keynotes I love a good keynote. For me a good keynote should be all about inspiration. Actual useful information is not a requirement. Last years “From Lancelot to Lovelace, and Beyond” by Robert Lefkowitz was a perfect example. Inspiring and visionary about something 500 years from now. Excellent closing keynote. I liken it to a really eye opening college lecture or talk where those dormant parts of your mind get activated and light up like a Christmas tree. It’s an amazing feeling when it happens.
Joel Spolsky and Cory Doctorow both had amazingly interesting keynotes at this years conference. Not fantastically useful but they definitely had me on the edge of my seat and listening.
The opening keynote, however, was pure marchitecture. Absolute classic business vapor for an hour and half. Zend is not unique in this respect. Big corporate keynotes I’ve seen almost always suck to one degree or another and this one was, unfortunately, no exception. All I wanted to do during the entire thing was leave and get to something else.

Zend Break-out sessions These were the only thing I didn’t like about the conference. Over half of the sessions ended up being thinly or not so thinly veiled commercials for Zend products. It’s their conference, they put the whole thing together and plastered their name everywhere, so why was it necessary for them to shamelessly whore out their products at every opportunity? It was awful. It was Zend Core, Platform and Studio again and again and again in an endless loop like some sort of a twisted “Groundhog Day” (the Bill Murray movie, not the actual holiday) It was an extension of the corporate opening keynote and every time I wasn’t paying attention I wandered into a new breakout session only to be disappointed.

Overall it was a fun conference and informative and interesting in so many ways. Given the chance, every PHP programmer should go and enjoy it and make your own decisions. At the very least, go for the parties, go for the mingling, the networking. So many of us work alone or in very small shops and we never get to experience what it’s like to be surrounded by so many people who actually get what we do on a daily basis. It is awe inspiring and electrifying and you can’t let a fly in the soup ruin a wonderful dinner…to completely mutilate a perfectly good analogy.