CodeWorks 2009 – Dallas, TX
I was lucky enough to make it out to the CodeWorks 2009 Conference that stop be in Dallas this weekend. This was my first programming conference to go to, and I had a blast. You can view the schedule of talks that I attended. I didn’t make it out to the Saturday talks, but I did attend all day Sunday. Got there a little before 09:00 and didn’t leave until around 18:00 (6:0o pm). The talks where good, and the attendance was pretty nice. A bit more then I actually thought would show up. The staff was very friendly and the facility was nice.
I don’t know if I had a favorite talk. The XDebug was pretty informative as I have never used it before, and always wanted that level of debugging. The PECL talk was also very interesting, it was a lot less formal then the others. It was part open forum , part talking about some of the lesser known extensions under PECL. I am glad I attended this one as it really pointed out some cool extensions that could really save some time developing. I also really want to check out the cario one as it looks like you could make some really nice charts and graphs with this. Also the Design Patterns talk was interesting. I knew of Design Patterns, but never really saw the use to take the time to learn about them. Well, after attending the talk, I am going to force myself to read more about them now. The speaker, Cal Evans, suggested the book, and it sounds like the de facto standard, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
The lunch was great, provided by the Dolce. Afterwards Microsoft provided an open bar with some hot hors d’œuvre. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity and had an ice cold Shiner Bock and some chicken on a stick. It was a great way to end the day.
