Well, the party’s over – the booths have been packed up, the X-Boxes put away and most of the attendees have already scattered back towards which ever of the four corners of the world they arrived from. Happily, things seemed to go really well this year and overall, I feel like it was a better conference than the previous years.

Things seemed to flow well – the sessions were easy to find and were usually full up with eager developers wanting to glean what they could from the talk. A great range of topics was presented – here’s just a small list:

• API Development
• PayPal’s developer offerings
• memcached
• PHP Security
• mobile application development with PHP
• High performance MySQL tips
• Unicode (because, after all, what PHP conference these days would be complete without a talk on this)
• DateTime
• Agile development

And that’s not even the half of it – there were around fifty-five talks in all presented over three days (including the tutorials on the first day). Thankfully, for those that weren’t able to attend, the folks over at the Zend Developer Zone will have podcast recordings (and slides too, I think) of each of them posted soon.

I also want to make mention of someone who played a big part in helping make sure things came together both before and during the conference this year – Cal Evans. His daily duties included not only being the MC for the event, but also more behind the scenes magic that helped the whole event come off so well. The best part about it all was that, despite the Zend duties that he always had to attend to, he always had the time to stop and work with the people in the community – even if it was just to stop off and connect two people (“you gotta meet this guy…”).

The hotel was nice and the events in the evenings were a nice chance to mingle with ther developers in a bit more informal setting (oh, and Yahoo – maybe not so much with the comedian and magician next time around). There were a few things that I imagine couldn’t be helped too much (the quality of the service at the hotel, the coordination of the vegetarian meals), but they didn’t distract too much from the overall feel of the conference.

Here’s hoping to see you all next year (and hoping I get to come! heh)