26 July 2007

OSCON 2007: Thursday

Enjoyed about half the keynotes too much this morning. The first one was cool: Ben Fry of processing.org showed some data visualization animations that have to be seen to be believed. And Steve Yegge of google gave an irreverently hilarious discourse on branding, and pointed out that branding is something that open source really lacks.

My first session was "Vim for PHP Programmers" by Anerei Zmievski (although the content was not very PHP-specific). This was an excellent talk with lots of neat Vim tricks. It was way too much material for a 45-minute presentation, but he made his slides available, so I'll be able to go through them later. As a Vim noob, I'm quite keen on learning tricks like easily wiping out the text between paired curly braces (or angle brackets or parentheses).

In a couple of the sessions I've attended this week, including today's "Untangling the Web: Dealing with Legacy PHP Code" by Clinton Nixon, people have expressed significant disdain for templating engines in PHP. I've used smarty for a couple of years and really like it. So I guess I don't really understand this sentiment. shrug

"Cache That" by Gopal Vijayaraghavan talked about APC, an opcode and data cache for PHP (Gopal is the lead maintainer of APC). This was pretty interesting, and he talked about some subleties of using APC.

My favorite talk of the day was "PHP Addons for Fun and Profit". (I didn't get the speaker's name, but she said that her blog is coffee.geek.nz). This talk was incredibly informative, with lots of good stuff about memcache and eaccelerator. I'm looking forward to giving memcache a try.

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