I Hate You Too

Geeks pay thousands of dollars and fly from all over the world to attend the annual Zend/PHP conference. To my dismay, my employer insisted that I attend ZendCon this year. These types of venues are generally a waste of time and contain a crowd I don’t particularly get along well with. I agreed to go since the ticket, and my time, were on their dime. Get out of the office and get lots of overtime? Hey, why not. Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe it will even be fun…

Presentations
During the 4 days of the conference I attended a total of 21 presentations. Of these, I would only 5 were even bearable. The remaining 16 sessions I attended had little or no good information, or was presented in a manner that was laughably amateur.

Below are the 5 best presentations. When I say best, I mean best by ZendCon’s worthless standards. Be sure to bring a laptop or a book or something.

“The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture” by Terry Chay
The presentation was mostly about Terry swearing a lot and showing stolen Shrek clips. Along the way he threw in a bunch of jokes that were almost funny, but not quite. Most of this presentation was worthless, but he did convey one very important point. Planning, code standards, security, documentation, etc. - all this is meaningless if you don’t have a working product. I’m not sure where “art” fits in this at all. In fact, it seems like he was proving the exact opposite - that art is a far second compared to business.

“High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques” - Eli White
Eli shared some insight into the various scaling issues and solutions that are currently used at digg.com. Digg is a disgusting cesspool of fanboys and inaccurate sensationalist bullshit, but still a prime example of how PHP can be deployed in an effective manner. Many of the tips were nothing new or innovative, but he is a good enough presenter that he was able to keep it interesting a moving quickly. I didn’t take a lot of new knowledge with me from this presentation, but I did gather a few bits that got me thinking in new directions, and any presentation that can do that is worth attending.

“PHP Features You Didn’t Know Existed” - Eli White
I expected to be completely disappointed, as I was in the other presentations. I was pleasantly surprised to find that about half of the features he mentioned I had forgotten existed. Some of them are very useful. Also, Eli’s face twitches a lot on stage. I don’t know if this is because he has some kinda disability or just an allergy, but it’s kinda funny to watch.

“Great Software” - Joel Spolsky
Joel’s message is that people are shallow morons, so give them pretty shiny things and functionality comes second. Unfortunately, he is correct in this matter. His presentation was far from perfect. It was too long and would have been better if he had removed about half of the stupid jokes. Still, it was still the best of the show.

“Stay Free! How Open Source Affects Culture” - Cory Doctorow
I don’t remember much of what this presentation was about. It probably wasn’t all that great. I remember it was something about open source software. I also remember leaving about 15 minutes into it to get myself a muffin. That probably doesn’t sound very interesting, but by ZendCon standards that gets you in the top 5.

The most useless presentation was “PHP Diversity - PHP applications in a Heterogeneous IT Environment”. This turned out to be a presentation put out by a couple retards from Microsoft, showcasing the wondrous possibilities of PHP running on the infamous IIS. A complete bait and switch as “Diversity” was no where to be found.

People
The attendees of this technology convention are exactly what you would expect. There are no fake lightsabers or idiots dressed up like Klingons, but the people are largely the same. There were even official Zendcon trading cards with some crappy prize to who ever collected the most. Zend definitely knows their audience. I was surprised about how many of these geeks don’t know shit about PHP. I overheard two of these idiots jabbering after we had just got out of a particularly lousy presentation. These dumb fucks were fanatic about how great the presentation was, and one of them was raving about how it “opened my eyes to new possibilities and things I would have never thought of”. In reality, the presentation was absurdly basic crap. I’m talking Chapter 2 in any descent PHP book.

Most of these people are ugly, fat, stupid and annoying, but the worst part is the smell. It wasn’t so bad on Monday, but as the week went on, the geek stench got worse and worse. By Thursday the smell in some of the smaller convention rooms was terrible. Imagine a fat geek who eats a couple bags of McDonalds and pork rinds, then tries to sprint a mile. That’s the smell I’m talking about. I seriously don’t know what the fuck is wrong with these people, but they must think that it’s acceptable only bathe once a week.

Parties?
The evening reception was entitled “Happy Hour 2.0″. It was held in the “Exhibit Hall”, which is where the sponsors all setup their stupid booths that no one gives a shit about. The only way to get people to even go in there is to give away free alcohol. A bunch of drunken losers talking about geeky bullshit and companies trying to sell me their garbage. No thanks.

Yahoo sponsored a “PHP Nightclub”. Whom ever thought up that title needs to get punched in their mother fucking nuts. PHP is just a tool, like a wrench. Do mechanics have “Wrench Nightclubs”? Of course not, because that would be fucking stupid.

Hundreds of unbathed social retards with an open bar… It’s like something out of a bad B horror flick about drooling circus freaks.

Final Thoughts
Uninformative, boring and completely lacking in people worth interacting with. Would I go there next year if I had to pay for my own ticket? Hell no. Would I go next year if I got a free ticket? Hell no. Would I go next year if my company paid for the ticket and all the time I spend there? Possibly, but more likely I’ll just say I went and take a 4 day paid vacation.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.