Since I'm already an OO programmer I didn't stay for too long, and I moved to the session on Best Practices by Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny. It covered the relevant bits from a php project development lifecycle, like source control, coding standards, testing and deployment. For developers that want to improve the quality of their applications, this was a very suitable session. If you missed it, my session (yes, shameless plug!) on 'enterprise php' on wednesday at 5.15pm gives a (much briefer) overview of such development practices.



When Matthew and Mike finished, it was time for lunch. We had lunchboxes with turkey sandwich, potato salad, apple and YAY! brownies! (I love brownies). During that lunch I had an interesting conversation with people from Partner400, a company specialized in IBM System-i environments and PHP deployments on those in particular. System-i, like last year, seems to get al ot of attention from Zend at ZendCon. Apparently PHP is getting popuilar on those environments.

After lunch, I attended Jay Pipes' session called 'SQL Query Tuning: The Legend of Drunken Query Master'. That title alone made the session a must-see on my schedule. Jay gave a lot of tips and tricks on SQL optimization, and I ended up learning a lot of things I have never really been aware of (and you'd think with years of experience in MySQL I would know a thing or two).

The tutorial day overall was well organized; there were some minor things like room temperature (at some point the main hall was rebranded to 'the fridge') and lack of poweroutlets, but those were aptly fixed by Zend DevZone's Cal Evans, ZendCon's organizer and host this year. Only thing that remained unfixed for the rest of the conference was that many of the projectors seem to be out of focus; in particular code samples were often hard to read.

At the end of the day, the ZCE's among us attended the ZCE party outside by the pool, where we had pizza, drinks, and the opportunity to talk to many people from the PHP community. After sunset it got quite chilly outside, so we went inside to the hotel bar to have a few more drinks, before we went back to our hotel rooms to get some sleep: the tutorial day was great, but also quite exhausting.