This year's Google Testing Automation Conference ended last Saturday. The people and talks were even more interesting that on last year's conference. Thanks to Allen, Amy and Susan for organizing such a great event!
The talks are online:
As well some official pictures (and unofficial ones on various photo storage sites), other attendees feedback, some links in the backlog.
A lot more stuff may be online. If you are curious: The official tag is gtac.
GTAC 2008 will take place in Hyderabad, India Seattle and I'm looking forward to it!
Posted Sep 01, 2007
Tagged as: Conference, GTAC, Software Quality
The conference is heading it's end, and it was the best conference, I've ever been too. The talks were awesome, and I met a lot of interesting people.
Summaries of the talks are already available as well as Photos.
Videos of the talks are available on Google Video, Slides are available at Google UK.
Posted Sep 08, 2006
Tagged as: Conference, GTAC, Software Quality
I was on this year's International PHP Conference 2005 in Frankfurt. It was a very impressive event and I've met a lot of people, I only know from the lists or by penetrating them with my PHP bug reports as well as people, I already know from further conferences or various other events. Way to much to mention here but a lot of interesting people. Take a look at the speakers list + add some of well know german PHP guys and you'll get an idea, who was there.
As you may guess - hey, it's a conference, there were also a lot of talks. Unfortunately, I could only visit 20% of them (there were 4-5 talks in parallel), so here is just a brief summary of the talks, I visited:
Ilia Alshanetsky - PHP & Performance
I only knew Ilia from the PHP mailing lists and some PHP 5.1 related QA stuff. From that I got the impression of him to be a very competent and nice person and that impression was more than confirmed during his PHP performance talk. Well, I did'nt hear much new things, but there were some very intersting things regarding PHP binary and module optimziations and tuning the various server parameters.
Derick Rethans - How PHP ticks
Derick's talk just gave a deeper view into PHP and helped to understand, why certain things work this way and why not. Very interesting, I'll see what I can make out of it.
Stefan Priebsch - Long Live the code
I did'nt know Stefan at all until the conference, so this was my first jump into the cold water. I did'nt regret it. His main focus was on refactoring code and keeping code simple. Although that talk did'nt give me much new input, it was very nice to dicuss some issues with him and the other attendants of his talk.
Ilia Alshanetsky - PHP Security
Back to Ilia. His talk about PHP Security was kind of amazing. Within minutes, he found a lot of security issues on a relatively popular german PHP site. The guy behind that site was in the audience, so it was real fun. I got some new input on how to penetrate sites and applications. I won't mention the site here and I won't mention the guy's name here, so don't ask.
Jeremy Johnstone - PHP and AJAX
Jeremy gave a brief talk about combining AJAX with PHP. I was a very nice talk, and he showed up some real nice AJAX applications developed by Yahoo!. I have'nt learn much in that session, but I got a little bit impressed what is possible with a little bit HTML, XML and JavaScript. Ah well, and in the end he handed out the most cool giveaway of the whole conference: A colourful flashing pen. Don't laugh, you also would like to have it if you saw it.
Daniel Convissor - Securing XML-RPC Communication
Daniel, some guy I knew that exists, but I've never had to do anything with on the lists unfortunately got his laptop broken, so his talk was some kind of unorganized. I'm pretty sure his talk would have been better if he had his slides available. So it was a little bit more than how to create and sign SSL and GPG-Certificates.
Emmanuel Cecchet - Database Virtualization
Emmanuel from Continuent, the company behind C-JDBC gave a very intersting talk about MySQL clustering. I already knew C-JDBC from some former project, so I was very interested in how the commercial and noncommercial development of that very cool tool. I'm pretty sure, we'll stay in contact.
Karl-Heinz Marbaise - PHP Testing mit Java Tools
Karl-Heinz Marbaise gave some examples on how to integrate JWebUnit with ant and Eclipse. Automatically testing web applications is not very new to me, in fact I do that in my daily work, but I've learned that I underestimated JWebUnit and that it's worth a look at.
Jeremy Johnstone - Java and PHP in the Enterprise
Jeremy talked about the advantages and disadvantages of Java vs. propritary stuff like C++ or VB vs. PHP vs. HTML vs. AJAX on the client and PHP vs. Java on the server. Hey, that was OK, but I expected a little bit more. Unfortunately he only talked 2-3 slides about those various PHP/Java integration solutions like Zend Core for Java or the PHP Java Extension, that would have been really interesting in my eyes. Of course, there were those cool pens again.
Social events, exhibition, enviroment
Last time I was on the Frankfurt PHP Conference was in 2001. That time, the hotel still was new, bright and shiny. It's still good, but not bright and shiny anymore. Who cares. The WLan was more than bad. It was not usable as all, most time around 500 byte/s - if you got a connection and an IP at all, so no change to blog about the event live or work on PHP. In fact - from what I've heared at least - the PHP 5.1.0 release was delayed through that bad connection. Guys, try to improve that next time.
The exhibition was some kind of interesting. I spent a lot of time at the Hardened PHP booth, mostly because they are nice guys. Mayflower did what they always do (hire people for few money and lend them out for a lot of money). Zend handed out the worst giveaway of the conference: Some blue plastic frog that makes annoying sounds and got broken after 10 minutes. As I already mentioned, Continuent has a very interesting product and I talked a lot with them.
Of course, on thursday evening there was the PHP lounge. Nice to talk to the people and share some ideas.
Posted Nov 09, 2005
Tagged as: Conference, PHP
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