Wow, what a rollercoaster ride 2008 was; in so many ways. The world faced the biggest financial crisis most of us have ever seen in our lives, the balance of power in the world shifted significantly and fuel prices both had an all time high and a 5 year low in the same year. Crazy times. And I think we haven't seen the end of it yet.

It's hard to analyse what the exact effect of all of this is on our own industry. If you look at TechCrunch's layoff tracker, it is clear that IT was not left unaffected. Several companies that are close to the PHP community have seen layoffs: SUN, current owner of MySQL, laid off about 5000 jobs; Yahoo, the biggest PHP user on the planet, laid off 1500 and even Zend was troubled by layoffs this year.

This week I'm at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008) in Los Angeles in sunny California (yup, being a CTO is a tough job!).

I was invited to this conference by Microsoft (thanks Bram!) because Microsoft is opening up to the PHP community, and I must say that so far they haven't disappointed me. Read what I've learned about what Microsoft is doing with PHP so far.

We're proud to announce that Ibuildings is the premier sponsor of the PHPNW conference that takes place on November 22nd in Manchester in the UK.

The conference features speakers such as Derick Rethans and Rob Allen (see the schedule for more speakers), and at 50 GBP it's very good value for money for PHP developers.

After our amazing roadtrip (see previous blog entries for trip reports), it was time for the first day of the conference. Or actually, day 0, as the first 'real' day would be on tuesday when the main conference starts.

We first went through registration, which went very smooth (only very short lines) and then had some coffee. I first sat in on the Object Oriented programming tutorial by Marcus Boerger from Google. It was a structured overview of Object Oriented programming. The target audience was clearly PHP programmers that wanted to learn how to do OO programming and I think Marcus did a nice job explaining it.

About this time last year, we had the pleasure of announcing the launch of our UK office. I'm very proud of the team we have built there (we have about 20 very talented people in our London office), but our growth hasn't stopped there.

This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars.

It's July the 8th.

Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

Last december, the community already stopped support for PHP4, but until the 8th of August, at least security fixes would still be done. If nothing has changed in the meantime, and I didn't read any evidence to the contrary, in 31 days from now,security fixes will no longer be provided for PHP4.

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th):

1. Conference day - 95% mark reached

95% of the conference day seats are sold. There are a few places left. Register while they are still available.

This week I'm at the php|tek conference in Chicago, organized by php|architect.

I'm happy to announce that as of now, we have a partnership agreement with php|architect! We will be adding the php|architect trainings to our existing training portfolio, which means that php|architects trainings can now also be delivered on-site in the countries where Ibuildings operates.

php|architect is a strong brand when it comes to PHP knowledge, so I'm very proud they teamed up with us!

The official announcement can be read here:

Press release

The latest instalment of the PHP Abstract podcast (hosted by Cal Evans from DevZone) is presented by our very own Lorna Mitchell.

In this podcast, Lorna talks about the process of importing data. Not the actual code you write, but the process in general.

We have finalized the program for the Dutch PHP Conference in June.

Based on feedback from the 'call for ideas' we have added a session on security. It will be presented by Johann-Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower.

Also, we are happy to announce that Terry Chay, a well-known blogger in the PHP community and informally called the 'PHP terrorist', will deliver the closing keynote. His 'the internet is an ogre' talk has been well received at Zend Conference last year, and we're getting him to Europe to awaken developers with his insightful and controversial presentation.