I recently attended Surge 2011 and thought I would publish some twitter notes and thoughts about the experience. This was the first conference I’ve attended in some time that wasn’t focused on a particular language (like ZendCon) and it was great that Surge was held right here in downtown Baltimore.
Day One
Node js / Chef / Riak
nanderoo Neal Anders Really wish I could be in two places at once for the #riak and #chef training today at #surgecon – until then it’s time to hack some node.js
- riak
rustyio Rusty Klophaus by …

I found myself the other day looking for a quick and dirty way to get back the old toarray() functionality from Doctrine v1 for use in populating my zend forms…

This was my first ZendCon, and my overall impression is a positive one. I walked away with a much better understand of the community and Zend’s involvement in it. I also was very fortunate to meet many new people from all over the world and of wide skillset and experience. The networking and conversations that took place outside of the sessions and at restaurants or poolside over drinks is where the real connections are made.

Disclaimer: This post covers at a very high level an approach I’m taking into a possible solution to a challenge I’m facing at work. It should in no way be deemed the end-all, be-all, de facto standard. In fact, I’d love to hear your alternative approaches in the comments below!
There are some things that are  not covered in this post, including:

How to install/compile/configure PHP, CodeIgniter, Doctrine, MySQL, or MongoDB.
The reasons why we are using a Relation Database and a Document-based Database. No really, don’t ask.
How to use the command-line features …

PHP-Tek 10 was organized by PHP Architect and Blue Parabola and held in Chicago, IL from May 18th – 21st this year. This was my first “PHP conference” and I was surprised with the breadth of related topics covered. The was allot of buzz in the air, but a few topics seemed to be very prominent, including the challenges of scalability, nosql and mongodb, hip-hop, application security, frameworks, and code testing and releasing management .

The PHP|Tek Conference is a little over a week away, and I’m excited about the opportunity to attend.  I’m also a little bummed that I’ll miss out on the Tutorial Day — specifically the session on “Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB“. Can someone take notes for me? ;o)
Here are some of the sessions I’m looking forward to:

Large Scale Systems by David Strauss
Continuous Inspection and Integration of PHP Projects by Sebastian Bergmann
HipHop for PHP by Scott MacVicar
Lean Mean PHP Machine by Jason Austin

I’ll also be …

Devin Henry Anders
Born On: July 12th 2009 at 4:35pm
Weight: 7lbs 14oz
Length: 22 inches
Website:  http://devinhenryanders.com/
Mom & Baby are doing fine!!

Here are a some beautiful photos from Kathy and Ryan’s Wedding at Barclay Villa in June of 2009! Congratulations to the happy couple! The full slide show can be found here.

Here are some interesting photos I took at the 2007 Capital City Bike Fest. I was out of town on business for the 2008 celebrations but hope to make it back for 2009!
For more information on this years festitivities check out the Capital City Bike Fest website – Sponsored by the great folks at Ray Price Harley Davidson here in Raleigh, NC.

As my first post to the photography section of my blog I thought I would share some of the photos I took last August up at the Virginia International Raceway for the 2008 AMA Big Kahuna.
The entire slide show can be found here. You might also be interested in the CCS Race I shot earlier that year as well.