Report PHP Unconference Hamburg

Hello,

Wow!! that was the best open source event I have seen since very long time.

It was German only.
Round about 300 attendees.

2 days, 4 rooms, 5 talks per room and day => 40 talks
+ a 5th room for ad-hoc groups

Means there were between 40 and 50 talks.

Talks were 45 minutes.

15 minutes break between every session and 90 / 60 minutes lunch - time for
chatting about what you just heard - time for discussing stuff

From contributor and user community for contributor and user community.

As the title said - it was an unconference.
That means the attendees decided which talks were made and not a committee.
You could suggest talks / session ideas up to the last minute.
The voting for the day happened in the mornings before the talks started.

Yeah - you also could suggest what you want to hear - and then they
looked for
speakers who could do the talk.

Talks that didn't won on first day stayed as suggestions for second day.

Because of side discussions on first day, there were lots of interesting
new suggestions
on second day.

I don't want to bother you with organisation stuff. I learned that
organisation isn't
very difficult.

Because attendees decided what will be made - there wasn't marketing talks.
Lots of technical PHP talks won.

But there also were none technical talks like "how to do a good talk",
"how to write
a good book".

I won a talk about my experiences with home office.

Most PHP contributors aren't students any more - and there won a talk
"Congratulation!
You are a leader now" - this talk explained the difference between
leader and manager
and it showed up problems and what you need to consider when you are in
a sandwich
position between top and the team under you.

This year there wasn't C-programming talks (you know PHP is written in C
too).

Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL talks got enough votes.

This doesn't matter because we had tons of side chats about databases.
E.g. we used one of the time slots to discuss database problems in games
business.

I learned a lot on this conference.
Of course I learned a lot about PHP and what I could do better when
coding PHP.
I learned the difference between leader and manager.
I learned why a cpu is a 1" square.

And I learned that I am a dying species - coding by just using emacs or vi.
PHP has the big problem that users often just use clicking tools like
eclipse.

There was a session about CouchDB and relational DBs in which we also
discussed
the trend that ppl store all in relational DBs even when it is totally
oversized. When
storing just in plain file would be the better way.

I learned here that with the clicking tools storing in MySQL is much
easier as storing
in files or in something else like SQLite, Postgresql, CouchDB or whatever.

Nobody expected well prepared slides. I wasn't the only one using chalk
and board.
Lots of talks were discussion with the whole room. You could see more
then a single
speaker in front in lots of talks.

A conference on which you didn't need to be afraid to ask questions -
doesn't matter
if you are a noob or expert.

Susanne

--
Susanne Ebrecht - 2ndQuadrant
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
www.2ndQuadrant.com