Well this was my fourth PHP London Conference, and I feel, by a fair ways, the best yet.
I remember writing last year, a little bit about my disappointment at the event. This year though was a marked improvement. I still rather fondly remember the very first conference at Southbank. That though, was a far smaller, less ambitious event than the one organisers delivered Friday.
Registration was quick and easy and Johanna Cherry was tremendously warm in welcoming guests. It is a small thing, having someone warmly and apparently genuinely welcome you to an event. But it makes a big impact, and it starts the day on the right foot.
The venue is the best we've gone to yet. Getting to and from the conference was straight forward. The staff were polite, prompt and unobtrusive. There was enough space over two floors for people to spread out and the food was of a good standard. If there is one criticism, it is of the toilets. They were not sufficient for the number of guests, by the end of the day they were not clean, and they were damn near impossible to find, squirrelled away in some recess you needed a GPS to navigate.
The first talk, Josh Holmes' 'The lost art of simplicity' didn't really knock it out of the park for me. The material itself was fine, if a little rote now (a theme, sadly, that ran through a number of the talks). It seemed to me, almost like a rehashing of Agile development with some nice slides. Harsh, but there was little to take away from it that we haven't heard in some shape or form before in the past 3 years. Maybe it is me too, or maybe it is a cultural thing, but I don't really take to the 'big' style of presenting. Aral Balkan last year, was really off-putting. And Josh was similar. When I say 'big', I mean loud and over-energentic. It's like they are trying to deliver a performance, rather than a talk. I want to hear intelligent people speak intelligently. Not channel Anthony Robbins.
I could listen all day to someone speaking in the style of Chris Shifflet or Ian Barber this year. Understated authority. But I seriously cannot deal with the forced hyperactivity of Aral or Josh.
I accept some people like 'performances'. At a gathering of developers, I don't.
Summing up though, Josh's talk was perfectly fine. I think 2011 should aim a bit higher, maybe take a risk and go with a keynote that really puts 'something' out there and makes a statement about PHP in the UK?
In the next part I'll talk about Antipatterns, Database Optimisation and 'understanding your audience'.