I’m exceedingly pleased to be speaking at the PHP Community Conference next month. I’ll be speaking about two projects I’ve been working on for a while WonderProxy, and XHProf. Apart from these being new talks, asking people to speak about their passions and projects, rather than something interesting they’ve stumbled upon as of late.

To be honest, as much as I’m looking forward to speaking, I’m looking forward to Andrei’s talk on what happened with Unicode and PHP 6 more than I’ve looked forward to a talk in a long time. Despite being saddened by the decision, and affected by the lack of great unicode support, I’ve never fully understood what happened. I’m looking forward to changing that.

Most of why I was looking forward to going before the speaking line up had been announced is simple: PHP needs this conference. User group conferences don’t seem as prevalent as they used to, and the ones that have survived seem to have either shrunk and become hyper-local, or grown to mimic the larger commercial conferences. There’s just too much value in the connections you make, and the conversations you have in a reasonably sized community conference to let them fade away. Thanks to Ben, Lisa, and Nick for making sure this doesn’t happen.

(I might be remiss if I didn't mention the cost, only $300USD, even in snow-pesos (CAD$) that's not a lot of money)