This year I had the oppurtunity to attend zendcon. I’m slowly beginning to embrace the fact that I’m a PHP developer. It was great being out there and picking up things that can make my job a bit easier. Some of the things I learned about include:

1) unit testing. This is a beast that I’ve been battling for years. I know the merits of it and how to use if but I’ve had a hard time finding a practical way to leverage it in our fast paced projects. In one of the sessions it was advised to implement it during bug fixing to help get started.

2) Continuous integration. This is pretty interesting and a concept I hadn’t heard of before. This is where the integrity of every build/commit is checked using monitoring tools (for PHP Phpundercontrol does the trick).

3) Code review. The code review session was really interesting because it pointed out techniques and tools for using numerical data like code coverage and lines of code to figure out the quality of code written. This is something I need to apply to our codebase.

4) database optimization. Went to a couple sessions that covered this topic(that speaks to the importance of it to me). The was a lot of tips for using mysql database constants to optimize the server and neat tricks for tweakig the hell out of a mysql installation.

5)leveraging proper ORM. Years ago I looked into ORM and propel came up but wasn’t exactly hyped. Recenty I’ve noticed a lot of talk about doctrine and specifically doctrine integration with zend frame work so I’m going to be giving that a shot and chucking the default zend framework table row gateway pattern.

6) there was an interesting session on approaching a new project from a different angle i.e. not starting by developing a databse schema. There were also interesting theories for taking some logic out of the controller and implementing a service layer.

7) PHP 5.3 . The updates are interesting to me because it brings features that miss from actionscript (and in some cases every programming language I’ve used) like namespaces, closures and garbage collection. What was also was the touted boost in performance as well as the huge performance boosts some libraries like doctrine are claiming will be experienced in the next releases.

no conference is complete without mention of the cloud. I can finally say which camp I feel most comfortable with which is infrastructure as a service (vs platform as a service). While the simple cloud API stuff was mildly interesting I was interested in vmware’s new cloud offering.

Added to this I am now a zend certified engineer which was cool too (especially considering i did it on a whim with no preperation). All in all really good stuff and would definitely go next year if I have the oppurtunity.