php[tek] - Chicago - November 10-14, 2014

We’ve posted all the photos we took (with help from some of the attendees) of the event! You can view them below or head over to Flickr to access them directly! Stay tuned, at some point in the future we’ll get the videos published as well!

We say this every year, but it’s always true.  It’s the attendees, all of you, that work to make php[tek] the amazing event that it is each year.

Stay tuned here for a few more updates before we are through.  We are working on post-processing all of the photos and video that we took during the conference to get those posted, and will update here when we do.

Also, if you missed our closing session, you may have missed a few big announcements that came up in this year’s closing session, namely:

• We are deep in plans for php[world] 2015 our conference dedicated to the wider application community of PHP
• We announced that we are running php[tek] 2016 – but that we are changing venues because we’ve outgrown this one.  We will be hosting php[tek] 2016, from May 23-27th, in St. Louis at the Sheraton Westport Chalet.
• Finally we also told everyone to stay tuned, but that we were going to be hosting yet another conference in Summer of 2016:  php[cruise] (Stay tuned for more details)

Our attendees at php[tek] have come to expect our fun little games each year. This year is no different. We have something extra-special planned for this year.

It appears there’s a murder¹ at this year’s conference!  We’ve assembled the likely suspects from the various attendees and speakers.  Will you be able to collect all of the clues and solve the mystery before the end of the week?  (You’d better if you want to be entered in a drawing for prizes!)

¹No-one will be harmed in the making of this murder mystery. No actual murder will take place. This is for fun. Enjoy yourselves.

So it turns out that our venue hotel has just a few rooms left available, so we’ve gone ahead and made a group block at both the Holiday Inn next door, as well as the Best Western across the street. Full details on the availability of these new room blocks and how to book them is now posted over on our Location and Hotel page.

As we do each year, we’ve created a mobile app to make your conference experience as smooth as possible.  This app will give you access to a customized schedule, details on the sessions & speakers, local maps and much more.  All cached offline so that even if your internet goes down you’ll always have your schedule.

It’s available on the following platforms:

• Apple iOS
• Google Play (Android)
• Web App (any device)

We don’t want you to panic, but php[tek] is going to sell out this year.  We are working with the venue to try to squeeze in a few more people, but we are going to be setting a hard max on attendance.  At this point we have 100 (or less) tickets available, and usually we sell more than that between now and the conference starting.

So if you were dragging your feet on when to snag a ticket, now is absolutely the time to get in there before we have to cut off sales.  Also you will need to make sure to book your hotel, since there are only 2 weeks left to get the discounted hotel rate.  Rates will go up on April 25th.

Unfortunately a vibrant member of the PHP community and one of our php[tek] 2015 speakers — Mike Dugan — has passed away.  All of us at php[architect] send our most sincere condolences to his family and friends.  Fellow Laravel community member Joe Ferguson has stepped up and offered to run a tutorial to replace the one that Mike was selected to present for us.

We have been graced with the presence of two separate PHP podcasts that are going to do live recordings at php[tek] this year. Both /dev/hell and Loosely Coupled will be doing recordings at 9:30pm Wednesday and Thursday evenings respectively. Check out the full schedule for more details. Come be a part of their studio audience. (And don’t forget to heckle!)

We will again be hosting a special summit event Wednesday evening of php[tek].  This year the topic will be “Open Source Contribution.”  We want to spark a discussion regarding how to create a better understanding between open source project leaders and people who contribute to these projects (or who want to).  Specifically, we want to help people who have never contributed to open source software feel comfortable and ready to start doing so!

The evening will begin with some opening remarks and a short primer on using GitHub as a contributor by Michelle Sanver.  We will then invite the leaders of many different open source projects to come on stage (and to the front row if we have too many) and serve as a panel to answer your questions and discuss the nature of their projects and how they handle contributions differently.

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We have some amazing keynotes lined up this year on very different topics:

Zeev Suraski, co-founder of Zend, one of the masterminds behind PHP 3, co-creator of the Zend Engine (PHP 4), and still a driving force in the PHP ecosystem, will talk about the future of PHP 7.

Yitzchok Willroth, a veteran programmer and Talmudic scholar, will share the “Wisdom of Sages” and how it can apply to your professional development as a software developer.

Jordi Boggiano, author of the infamously popular Composer tool will wrap up the conference by telling behind the scenes details of the Composer Open Source Project.

Check out the full schedule for the rest of the talks as well!