NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

--- Bryan Richard <bryan at pyzine.com> wrote:
> The current size of the conference probably won't allow us to be too
> granular with an Application Development track. One of the most well
> attended sessions at the first PHPCon was the PDFlif talk, which if a
> tough one to pigeonhole in anything other than a broad category track. 
> 
> One thing we could do is focus on a given technology for each day of the
> conference. Day One: Application Development with MySQL, Day Two:
> Application Development with XML and Web Services. This would also have
> the benefit of freeing up a track for, possibly, Education. The drawback
> is that topics like CLI or GD, or Rasmus' Tips & Tricks talk might get
> overlooked if we try to type the track to strong.

True; we wouldn't want things to get squeezed out the sides because they
don't fit nicely into a track's topic.  PHP is probably still young enough
that covering broad subject matter is important.

> I've very interested in doing an Education track and we had a number of
> Educators, students, and University IT folk at the first PHPCon.
> Depending on how it is structured, the appeal of an Education track
> might not pull Enterprise or your typical Application Dev attendees so
> we would obviously need to see a good showing from the Universities
> outlining the track, giving sessions, and attending. 

I've discussed this with our director at NYUCD if some of my software could
be used for presentation.  And while there is some official legalise to wade
through, I'm sure it'll be fine.  I'm not sure how to move forward with this,
but a large part of NYUCD's internal software (if not all of inhouse
development) is PHP.
 
> > > General Theme. What are the problems that you are looking to solve?
> > 
> > PHP recognized as more than just an "HTML embedded scripting language"
> 
> I think we are seeing this arise out of the Enterprise track. By and
> large, PHPCon's focus is the Web, but we certainly don't want anyone
> leaving thinking PHP is only a tool for your Geocities page. We didn't
> officially state a tag line for the first conference but I can see the
> need for something along these lines for the next. I believe PHP Journal
> was considering printing up shirts that made reference to Perl and Camel
> butts, but I don't know if we want to go that far. ;)

Sure we do - I'd grab a couple  :)

> > > What are you looking to take away from the conference?
> > 
> > This is a toughy.  Offhand, probably the satisfaction of feeling that PHP
> has been launched into the eastern seaboard, and has a strong development
> > community.  Also, possibly, the continued support of companies, following
> > suit of Yahoo!.
> 
> Yahoo! will most certainly be there and we are talking to other
> companies that are developing enterprise PHP applications. I think
> having the name of a major University or two that has adopted PHP
> internally would certainly add to the conference. And, as always, if
> anyone has any suggestions of companies that have adopted PHP, please
> pass the information along.

Well we can certainly put NYU in there, and I will continue to look at other
colleges/departments for further use of PHP.  Also, I have some relatives at
Columbia that may be able to point me in the right direction.  And as another
poster did, if anyone is using PHP in an educational setting (or any large
deployment for that matter), be heard!

Best,


=====
Hans Zaunere
New York PHP
http://nyphp.org
hans at nyphp.org