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 …

Update: In case the point wasn’t subtle enough, I have accepted a job. The notes below are my initial brain dump of the other interviews I had leading up to this. Thanks to everyone so far with the outpouring of support.

I thought I would share some of the experiences of the past 4 months. My hope is that you might find the information, especially related to the job market and my job search, insightful. I’ve also decided to keep the names of recruiters, agencies, and employers anonymous wherever possible.
Intro
There are …

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 …