Edin Kadribašić

The PHP Vikinger event was a great success. It was skillfully guided by Zak Greant who did such a great job orginizing it.

Since this was the first PHP event I attended and the fist unconference, I cannot really compare with "regular" conferences, but people tell me that PHP Vikinger was more relaxed and informal. I guess that was the meaning since there was no official agenda, no commercial interest behind it, etc.

First thing we did was to pick a list of topics that people would like to present or hear about. I half jokingly proposed "How to prevent Marcus Börger (a.k.a Helly) from turning PHP into Java", but decided against it. I do have a real problem with several descisions made in the last couple of months which make PHP more strict and you will probably be hearing a lot more about those if you ever decide to visit this blog again, but at the end I thougt that I express my opinion on mailing list where it belongs.

One of the topic that I found interesting was proposed by Kristian Köhntopp under the title "Things That Have No Name". I do belive that we have so many wonderful techniques in PHP that do not have name and perhaps naming them would help diminish the perception of PHP being a "toy language". Rasmus Lerdof muttered something about this session should be called "buzzword generation" but the group in general thought it was a great idea to do it.

There were also great sessions on PHP security which seems to be on anyones mind these days. Sebastian Bergmann gave an introduction of PHP Unit and about unit testing in general. I must admit that my knowlege on this topic was pretty thin so I found his talk very informative. I don't know how practical would be to implement unit testing in a company as small as mine is, but one of these I'm going to give it some more serious thought.

The second day was spent in a workshop where there was a demonstraction about the basic rules of developing a bigger project where several programmers are involved. How to determine where are the lines that devide different components, etc. Rasmus was in charge of making the presentation layer where he used the opportunity to demonstrate very good YUI javascript toolkit that allows for easy creation of dialog boxes, use of Yahoo's map API, AJAX connectivity and similar goodies. The end result of this excersise should be the creation of people.php.net which would have a registry of all individuals involved with the project, with their location information, graphical map displays and so on. Ammar Ibrahim promissed he would clean up the code and the CSS so we should be expecting the first version soon.

After living in Denamak for the past 15 years one starts to miss some things. Things like rivers and mountains. Me being from the Balkans, explains it a bit why I would miss such things.

Norway on the other hand is country that has plenty of both. Now that I am hear I wish I had more time to go around the country and see more of its natural beuty.

Last night I attended the Midsummer party organized by Skien Municipality. Lots of people showed up and there was a huge bonfire. All in all I was left with a very pleasent impression of Norway its nature and its people.

I'm boarding a plane to Sandefjord, Norway tomorrow. I will be attending an unconference titled PHP Vikinger. For a long while people were trying to convince me to attend one of many PHP conferences, but I somehow managed not to visit any. I nearly got to Amsterdam last year (had the reservation, plane tickets, etc.) but last minute flue got the better of me so I was unable to go.

This time it looks like I'm going to make it. And I'm looking forward to meeting some of the people I have known for years on the mainling lists and IRC channels.

Well, I need to join the 21st century and try to write a note or two from time to time.