Andrew Mager

Terry Chay is very good at gathering important people together, so when I heard about the lineup for a PHP-flavored geekSessions, I knew tychay had something to do with it.

As always, The Forbin Group and SF Beta hosted the event at the beautiful City Club atop 255 Sansome. Cindy was a great hostess.

geekSessions 1.3’s panel was absolutely superb. Even for someone who is still a PHP beginner, I picked up on a lot of their programming ideals, and how they solve problems.

Lucan Nealan from Facebook, Sara Goleman from Yahoo!, Cal Henderson from Flickr, and Andrei Zmievski from Outspark had everybody interested throughout the whole show. They engaged the audience, and poked fun at each other.

Here is Terry Chay introducing Cal Henderson. Sorry for the amateur quality of this video:

Cal wrote the book on scaling web architectures. Little did I know that PHP was his preferred language. I liked his presentation because he used Flickr photos throughout the slides, and then gave the URLs of every photo at the end.

Richard Crowley warned me about his infamous business card:

Andrei spoke about the future of PHP in version 6, especially internationalization. The fact that you can use almost any Unicode character in the codebase is fascinating to me.

I learned a lot from all of these speakers, and I even tried to take notes. Download PDF (20kb).

On February 7th at CNET, Terry Chay will give a recycled talk about OO PHP.