Single track conferences like Symfony Day always tend to have a more intimate feeling which make them all the more enjoyable in my opinion. While the talks were certainly interesting, I personally go to conference to use the opportunity to meet all the IRC/github accounts in person. Its more efficient to move discussion forward, get a feeling for how the given person thinks and just to build up some shared fun experiences outside of “just” coding. Symfony Day delivered all of that and more really. As a case in point about the more check out the “ Knplabs Boys” (note, only one actual KnpLab employee was on stage). Just a pitty that people like Bernhard, Jon, Kris and Johannes didn't show their faces. The conference itself was also very well organized and the wifi was working mostly :)

To me the more important event was the hack day on the following day. It would be such a waste to not leverage having lots of smart developers in one place for some actual code hacking. This hack day started slow, or at least it felt like it. But when I looked at the progress that was made during the day I was quite blown away.  PHPCR ODM got a lot of love from Uwe for “relation” annotations. Thanks to insights by Stof the ChainRoutingBundle was also pushed forward by David, which is really a key piece to solving the need for dynamic routes in the CMF. Mean while I had the opportunity to introduce I guess a dozen people to PHPCR and the Symfony2 CMF. Thomas demoed SonataPageBundle and Fabrice also demoed his Radiant CMS port Roger. Thomas also worked on merging ODM support into SonataAdminBundle. Both will will hopefully soon be integrated with PHPCR. Jordi and Nils also made a lot of progress on Composer and all the while Henri and Igor jump started DNode support for PHP. Stof worked on some big improvements to the SecurityBundle .. and I am sure I am missing other stuff that happened during the hack day.