DC PHP Conference Recap

• Sun, 22 Oct 2006 at 18:38:20 GMT
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This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I'm sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.

I attended more talks than usual, including:

• Getting Started with Zend Framework (Mike Naberezny)
• Writing Maintainable Code (Laura Thomson)
• High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques (Eli White)

Although I didn't see his talk at the conference, Adam Trachtenberg visited OmniTI on Wednesday to give a talk on ext/soap at our weekly developer session.

My talk about PHP Security Testing was just after lunch, and I received a lot of positive feedback. My other talk, The Truth about XSS, was the last talk of the day, and I went over by about 15 minutes. I think this is currently my most interesting talk, and as a testament to this, the room remained packed despite the fact that free beer was available elsewhere. :-) Thanks to everyone who gave up free beer to hear my talk.

I also briefly met David Recordon, one of the guys involved with OpenID. He works at VeriSign, who offers a Personal Identity Provider. This is something Wez has been playing with recently. Hopefully he'll blog about his experiences.

Damien Seguy, who has been tracking PHP 5 adoption statistics for us, mentioned to me that he is gathering statistics from open phpinfo() pages. His statistics reveal that register_globals is enabled on about half of these. (Adam suggested that there is probably a relationship between those who enable register_globals and those who have open phpinfo() pages.) I'm eager to see these statistics published.

Laura, Damien, Adam, and I finished the day at a Chinese restaurant, where I managed to find some spicy food. Damien and Adam both speak Chinese, so I think they appreciated the chance to practice.

All in all, the conference turned out pretty well, and I'm happy to have been a part of it.