Blog Posts

So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. Actually this was in very close proximity to where I grew up, which was nice as I was staying at my parents place. Usually staying there requires a one hour ride to the hipster areas of Berlin to attend a conference. In this case it was just a 2 stop U-Bahn ride. That being said, this wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.

I have been on the conference tour for quite some time now and on top of that I travel about every 2nd weekend to some frisbee tournament around the globe. Yet I have never visited the UK. So far the most I have seen of the UK was transiting via direct bus from one London airport to another. So I was quite thrilled when my talk about the Symfony2 CMF was accepted for PHPNE in Newcastle. I was also quite keen to learn more about the PHP community over there. At any rate I flew in on Monday evening and made my way to the hotel in a light drizzle which perfectly matched my image of UK weather. But even in the dark one could make out the historical feel to the architecture in the city center. I cut the sightseeing short and crashed into bed. Next day I made my way to the conference venue which was set at a movie theatre. There were countless busy bee's from the organization team and in general this conference was organized top notch. Quite an impressive achievement given that this was the very first PHPNE. The theatre also provided top notch projectors and of course comfy seats.

Last week I went to Spain to speak at the 2012 edition of deSymfony, a Spanish conference on all things Symfony, and more. I was really looking forward to this event since I made many friends there last year. Also the food and weather in Spain are awesome, specially around Barcelona and Castellón –the city where the conference took place. Considering that the conference was in Spanish and the talks I'll be commenting have slides in Spanish I will continue this blog post in Spanish. ¡Adios Amigos!

This week, I attended the 7th IKS Community Workshop in Salzburg, Austria, on the topic "Semantic Enterprise Technologies in action and explained" to present the CMF editor done by Liip. The presentation formed part of a session about how IKS' semantic technologies can be implemented for editing content.

 Last week I had the chance to speak at the Norwegian Developers Conference which was a very huge event with 8 simultaneous tracks and speakers like Aral Balkan, Lea Verou and Robert C. Martin.  In my case I was demoing RabbitMQ and for the first time presenting RabbitMQ in Action in a conference.

Last Saturday I attended SwissJeese, the first Swiss tech conference dedicated exclusively to JavaScript. It was co-organised by @bdufresne and @shvi from JSGeneve and JSZürich respectively. Thanks to the sponsors, it was complitely free (as in beer) to attend and there were even food and drinks included.

Last week I presented Scrum@liip to a very interested audience. 40 people at 8am was really impressive. It was great to see how people feel that we really pushed Scrum to a very high level. Even if we sometimes feel that we could do even more and faster. But all is very relative... below an extended version in German. Here you get to the slides.