Sunshine PHP (Part 2)

Conference day (Free Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner included for the conference attendees):

Day: Thursday

Venue: Grand ballroom, Embassy Suites

Time: 9:00 am to 4:00 pm

Speaker: Michelangelo and Gary Hockin

The day started exactly with breakfast at 7:00 am in the hotel (fruits: cantaloupe, banana etc and orange, apple juice and yogurt). 

9:00 am till 12:10 pm : Michelangelo bringing forward what PHP as a language has to offer. There was some hiccups in between due to projector display and table arrangement in between of the conference. Those are understandable on the first day but could have been best if those things were taken care off before the conference. In terms of material and the speech it was fabulous. Michelangelo was kind enough to make sure that minute details were captured to its best. 

Attendees: 20-30 in all.

12:00 pm till 1:00 pm: Hotel lunch with majority vegetarian options. It was nice to have mashed potatoes, bread, tomatoes and cheese. I had table for myself and one of the speaker (Michelangelo) joined. He was kind enough to share where he came from. He also shared that his 7 year old son is vegetarian as he never supported eating livestock supplies who are meant to live with liberty and not to be killed and eaten. That was emotional moment for me and got so much respect for his son.

1:00 pm to 4:00 pm : Gary Hockin with his continuous talk with ZF2 framework. It was for those who already know little bit about the framework. But nevertheless coming from the framework consuming background, I was able to catch some of the intricacies framework has to offer. Attendees strength: 5-10 in all.

Later in the evening there was light snack in the hotel which I did not knew. Due to lack of knowledge, I had to order Papa Johns pizza in the room. The restaurant was around 1 mile from the hotel. I tried walking to this place but it looked there was no walkway from hotel to this place so after walking little bit outside the hotel had to come back to hotel again and order online. 

Day: Friday

Venue: Grand Ballroom, Key Biscayne 2

Time: 9:00 am to 6:15 pm

Speakers: Josh Holmes, Eli White, Gemma Anible, Sharon steed, Amanda Folsom, Jonathan Leblanc, Adam Wathan

9:00 am. Keynote speaker Josh Holmes gave a presentation on open source projects. He is from Microsoft(One of the sponsor of the event).  Attendees; around 200.

10:15 am: Eli White gave a presentation about Web Security.  It was nice to get overview on how to make your application more secure on web. Attendees: 30- 40 in all.

11:30 am: Gemma Anible on Navigating your GIT repository. She was the thinnest and the longest young girl I ever saw. She made things pretty easy looking. It was little advanced level but digestible. Attendees: 40-50 in all

12:30 pm: Lunch time in hotel. I had a table for myself and this time another person named Christian came to join. He was from Mexico and came to US being called by his startup company. He was local to Miami and was saying that rice and plantain is the local food here. People relish those food here in Miami.

1:30 pm: Keynote speaker Sharon Steed on some inspirational talks. She was the only one who was bold enough to speak in front of the audience of around 200 people. She was special as she stuttered and her talk was on how to face the fear and not let your physical disability act as a roadblock from what you want to achieve. Attendees: around 200.

2:45 pm: Amanda Folson on Give me REST. It was based on APIs which was little difficult to understand and she seemed bit of reading the slides and was not able to share the story which others were able to share. Nevertheless, she had wonderful content which I was not able to get due to some technical difficulties. Attendees: 40-50 in all.

4:00 pm: Jonathan LeBlanc on PHP Identity and Data security. He is one of the Emmy winners. He was good in his presentation and slides. He was brilliant in his understanding and was able to convey his message in crystal clear fashion. Attendees: 30 - 40 in all.

5:15 pm: Adam wathan on 4 rules of simple design. He is one of the continuous speaker without very short break and his agility in transforming the code from giant junk to couple of lines was the highlight. He knack of doing things in very clean fashion was brilliant. Attendees: 40-45 in all.

6:30 pm: Evening light dinner in the hotel. Chips, sauce, biscuits, honey mustard, pretzels etc.

Day: Saturday

Venue: Grand Ballroom, Key Biscayne 1, Key Biscayne 2, Key West Ballroom, Grand Ballroom.

Time: 9:00 am to 8:00 pm

Speakers: Jessica Dunbar, Joe Ferguson, Samantha Quinones, Stephanie Evans, Steve Grunwell, David Bisset, Matt Stauffer.

9:00 am: Keynote speaker ( Jessica Dunbar) spoke on open source project and his challenges to communicate with wide range of communities working with people from different parts of the world. She did mention about her encounter of having web call with people from Saudi. It was difficult for her as in Saudi women and men have so much difference in thinking. Men are more dominant and women have to be in curtain even while having web chat. In professional world women cannot talk to men. Once she had to deal with one engineer in Saudi and she was not able to talk to him directly but had to go with another person in his team to talk to him and she had to act as media. Audience: around 200.

10:15 am: Acceptance and functional testing with Co-deception by Joe Ferguson. He tried to entertain us with features of testing using Co-deception. For him testing was like writing English using Co-deception. It was nice to hear his talk but audience had so many questions for whom he had no answers and so does the tool. Audience: 30-40 in all.

11:30 am: Building real time data pipelines by Samantha Quinones. She works with AOL and her speech was more into building real time applications using Elastic search. Little bit high level but was informative. Attendees: 25-30 in all.

12:30 pm: Lunch in the hotel. avocado salad, roasted potatoes were the only veg options. But enough to fill in the gap.

1:30 pm: Keynote speaker (Stephanie Evans) spoke about her team spirit in sailing to Golden gate bridge from some place in South Africa. It was inspiring talk and came to know how challenging it is to sail in midst of the windy turbulent water and weather. It was a competition and race for 24 days and they emerged the winner in between so much troubles. Attendees: around 200.

2:45 pm: Taking the web offline by Steve Grunwell. The speaker was from Columbus, Ohio. He shared his experience on how to access the web content offline, It was informative but was not so great. He works with xylem (water company) and they were using Dropbox. Talk was more about how they deal with challenges but not that useful on taking web offline in general. Attendees: 20- 25 in all.

4:00 pm: WordPress REST API by David Bisset. The speaker was local from Miami, Florida. He spoke about the advantages WordPress API has to offer. Though he was knowledgeable but not that informative. His slides were more informative than his speech. It was nice to know about API but again was not able to get his material for reference. Attendees: 5-10 in all.

5:15 pm: Idea to Prototype in 50 minutes by Matt Stauffer. This was the speech of the event. The speaker took an example of how developer can save time and can convert his idea into prototype in quick succession. He was breathless and he was able to convey a lot in 40 minutes instead of 50 minutes. His speech was encouraging and he hardly took any break in his speech. Attendees: 35-40 in all.

6:15 pm: Keynote speaker (Cal Evans) on Groupies, Roadies and Rockstars. He was the terminator and what a way to terminate the event. He also focussed on open source project and tried to tie it with those 3 types. Very nice to hear his passion and encouraging for developers who start can fit in either of those roles or all based on priority projects. Attendees: around 200

7:15 pm: There were ruffle tickets and prize distribution for the lucky ones having same ticket number. Prizes ranged from elePHPant, drummers, books, speakers, mechanical instruments, unique t-shirts etc. I was not able to win any of those but was nice to see many of them winning.

That was little bit about end to end conference details. Please stay tuned for exciting journey back home from Miami, Florida.