This past weekend the Hungarian web conference was held in the amazing Buda Castle, in Budapest. It was a one day conference, with talks being held on 3 tracks, all in all 21 talk. This was my first time here and I attended as a speaker with a talk on Zend Framework 2 (more on that later).

The conference was great, and, as per the organizers, attended by more than 700 people! The building is quite big, so I didn't feel like it was too crowded, but there were some complaints about not having enough seats for everyone. I found it weird that there was no proper lunch time set, with only 15-20 minutes left between sessions, so I ended up eating only after 3PM.

The talks I attended were also great, especially the PHP 5.4 introduction talk by Kovács Ferenc, aka Tyr43l, and the MySQL high availability and the InnoDB data recovery talks by Podor István.

As for my talk... Well, that was just plain horror. I got so nervous at the beginning that I completely forgot what was I supposed to say. A completely blank mind. Just standing there, looking at the slides and not knowing what am I even doing there... Completely fubar'd the first part of the presentation. The second part got somewhat better, but my overall feeling is just... Ugh, kill me now, please.

Anyway, I decided to give up on my speaking "career" and just stick to programming.

Happy hackin'!

I'll be giving a talk at this year's Hungarian Web Conference, Webkonf, which will be held on October 8th in Budapest. The topic of the talk is Zend Framework 2 and with the recent happenings in the framework world and in the community (thanks Paddy!), it will be both interesting and challenging to create a talk worth listening :) Oh, and I'll be presenting in Hungarian :)

If you'll be there, I'd like to meet you :) I'll be in Budapest from Friday the 7th, till Sunday the 9th.

This year's DORS/CLUC has been and gone, 18th in the row for the organisers, first one (but not the last!) for me. For those of you who not know, DORS/CLUC is a conference about GNU/Linux and open source, which took place in the nice town of Zagreb, Croatia, in one of the auditoriums of FER (Faculty of electronics and computer science). I attended the conference as a speaker with a lightning talk on PHPPlaneta.net and a regular talk on Zend Framework.

First of all, I'd like to thank Nikola Plejić from NeutrinoDev for having me crash at his place during these couple of days. I hope that I'll have the chance to return the favor one day :) BTW, if you need some Drupal/PHP/Python work done, you should talk to Nikola, he's a kick ass dev ;)

The overall feeling I have about this conference is GODDAMN THIS IS AWESOME I WANT MOAR!!!1! Seriously, great organising, great talks, great speakers, great people, great food, great town, great WiFi. Granted, I haven't attended a lot of conferences so far, but I honestly doubt it can get a lot better than this.

Organisation

I really can't say anything bad about the organisation. Before the conference the organisers where responsive via email and twitter for any questions/comments I had, the conference website was updated regularly. During the conference they worked hard to keep everything in order, to reduce the delays and to keep the coffee machine full of hot coffee at all times :)

Talks and speakers

The first day had Mark Shuttleworth, from Canonical and outter space as the keynote speaker with a talk generally on open source and Ubuntu. Adnan Hodžić gave one of the best talks about his experience on organising DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Other talks included web and mobile development, OpenStreetMap and some hardcore talks on LXC virtualization and MySQL fatal crash recovery.

The second day had Jan Wildeboer, Red Hat's evangelist as the keynote speaker, with a great talk on open source. Other talks were about some business wishy-washy (I skipped those :P), databases, open source in academia... Personally, I think the first day was better, but nevertheless the second day was great and interesting too.

Although a bit exhausting, as both days had more than 10 hours of talks, it was really worth it. Now only if I had more hours in a day so I could play around with and look more into all of the stuff I learned here.

In the end, I'm really glad I came here, will be here next year too. If you're into open source (and you better be! :P), I only can recommend you to check out and keep an eye on DORS/CLUC next year.

Until next time,
happy hackin'!

DORS/CLUC is a conference about GNU/Linux and everything open source which takes place in Zagreb, Croatia, on May 16-18. I sent two talk proposals and both got accepted! Yey! The first talk will about PHPPlaneta.net, the story behind it, the ideas, the plans... The second talk will be an introduction to Zend Framework. I know, zf2 is right behind the corner with all it's PHP5.3 goodness, but we are still, and unfortunately will be for a while, stuck with hosting providers running php5.2.

Hopefully I'm not going to be the only PHP dev there and someone will find the talk(s) worth their time :D

More than anything I'm looking forward to finally visiting Croatia and meeting fellow hackers :)

Really, it is. No code in this post. Not a single line.

It's ~10PM and I'm having my coffee #3. Not healthy, not at all. I once decided to have at most 2 coffees a day. For the past couple of days I'm breaking that decision, too much work gathered (damn you Holidays!), and I'm catching up now... I even drank energy drinks last night. Was up until 3AM, buzzin'... Working mainly on my graduate work, a desktop application, written in Python and QT, which is communicating with a web service. It's fun to learn new things...

I was struggling with a character encoding problem for almost a day, which is now sorted out, luckily. Damn Unicode characters. Or the lack of support for them. Anyhow, if you're interested in reading up on character sets and encoding, read this article, The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), a very good read. Made me realize a thing or two. Can't wait the Unicode Support in PHP.

In 2 weeks I'm starting to work as a full-time developer. Oh the joy of a regular paycheck. And, of course, the chance to learn new things; never enough learning.

In the next 2-3 months I'll attend (as an author, of course) a couple of conferences, the first one will be in March, YuInfo 2009. I have 24 hours to finish my part of the paper for it. Guess what's the topic of the paper? Connecting Python desktop applications with a web service. Yea, my graduate work :)

The second one will be in April, E-trgovina 2009, the topic is not yet decided, but we'll come up with something. Btw, “we” are, my buddy Bojan, our professor from the College, Zlatko, and me. A nice little gang of developers.

We'll also start a new blog, soon — hopefully this week. It'll be cool and fun and nice and everything. That's all you need to know for now. Stay tuned.

I finished my coffee, so it's time to go back to the code.

Cheers!

P.S.: What I'm really trying to do with this post, is to brake my habit to write only about code. So, expect a bit more of “personal” posts around here.