What was the single most important thing I learned today? Always bring your condom! Er, I mean, your keyboard condom¹.

First official day of the conference and my new MacBook survived three spills, two coffee and one water and lived to tell the tale.

Man these php devs just don’t like Macs!

(See what I did there? When this tweets, the hashtag will be picked up!)

So in less than a month I’ll be attending php|tek¹ adn its high time I decided what talks I want to be seen at. Erm, I mean, which I want to attend…

Tutorial Day:

I’m torn bewteen MVC Development in PHP and Web Application Security Boot Camp but in the end I think MVC will win out…

PHP Code Review wins in the afternoon. And that evening I’ll be busy attending the ChiSox/Twins game.

Day 1:

Highly Scalable Web Applications

Streaming XML

MySQL Server Performance Tuning

SPL to the Rescue

Getting it Done

Security Centered Design

Day 2:

Exceptional PHP

Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML and JS in AIR

Seven Steps to Better OOP Code

PHP Database Application Architecture for Scalability and Availability

Bend SQL to Your Will With EXPLAIN

Taking it All Offline with SQL Anywhere

Day 3:

Out with Regex, In with Tokens

Working with Microformats

It looks like I’m going to have a lot of fun and will learn a lot. I’m hoping some of my methods get justified as well by my peers.

Kudos again to my work for sending me on this trip, and to my wife for allowing it!

I’ll be attending php|tek 2009¹ in Chicago this May. If anyone is attending who knows me, we should make plans to meet up.

I’m excited for this conference. I can’t remember the last time I attended a programming conference, let alone one being paid for by my employer!