So far, the conference has been going pretty well, and has been interesting. There is a very diverse group of people from all over the world, which probably represents the actual PHP community well. Many of the lead developers of PHP and various PHP extensions are here, which is cool. The first thing that struck me during the opening keynote yesterday is that the core group of developers is young. For example, Zeev Suraski, cofounder of Zend and one of the lead developers of the Zend Engine, is probably less than 25. This means that these guys were probably in their teens when they started creating PHP 3 in the late 90’s. The majority of the attendees seem to be in their twenties, with some exceptions, including one guy who can’t be a day over 12 years old!
The people at our dinner table are all attendees of the conference. We have a man and his wife from Iowa (he’s one of the presenters), a 20 year old from Australia, and a guy from Israel who hadn’t slept in over 48 hours. We had some good conversations about North Dakota winters, why the US still uses pennies, and what ranch dressing tastes like (how do you explain the taste of ranch?).
As of this morning, we still don’t have Internet access setup (I’m writing this offline on the laptop using ecto and will post it when connectivity is available. In a way it’s nice to be away from the email and the work that goes along with it, but I wish I had a chance to email or chat with Casey. I miss her a lot!
From the sounds I hear coming from the ship right now, I think we are docking at Coco Cay. It might be difficult staying in our little theaters this morning when you just know everyone else is out in the sun and on the beach. Thankfully, we only go until the early afternoon today and then get the rest of it off!