I’ve waited too long to write this, but Chris Jones’s Trip Report reminded me, so here I am with my own report.
Back in August, Er Galvao invited us, i.e., SourceForge, to speak at PHP Brasil ’08. And as soon as I got wind of the opportunity, I jumped on it – quickly enough to beat luapffuh to it. 🙂 The topic emerged as “PHP at SourceForge: Powering the World’s #1 Open-Source Website” and I set off putting together the presentation (keynote, ppt, pdf). A couple months later I set out for Brazil – excited but not really knowing what to expect.
Chris’s report gives a great summary of the conference, so I’ll just add a few of my own notes and experiences …
I agree UNIFIEO was a great venue. I appreciated the stadium-style seating of the lecture halls, and the sponsor booths looked very nice. It was well located relative to the equally-great Best Western hotel where many conference attendees were staying; the logistics were very well-managed, thanks in no small part to Anderson.
We gave out some very cool “hack freely” t-shirts before our keynote, and I was encouraged that many audience members wore them immediately. I think Chris understates the popularity of their plush elePHPants – people were going nuts over them, especially the big one.
I hope my presentation (video below, starting at 25m) was informative and entertaining. We really enjoy using PHP here at SourceForge, and I hope maybe we cleared out some of the clouds about our implementations. As I say in the presentation – there’s nothing really magical about what we do, nor do I think any of the other large and popular websites have any secret magic in their PHP systems. For sure we use some special techniques and designs, but they’re publicly available for anyone, and I hope that helps to motivate anyone looking to build out their own popular PHP sites.
Personally, I was very motivated and inspired by the PHP activity I saw in Brazil. Sometimes it’s hard for us to appreciate the truly universal participatory nature of open-source software unless we go far outside our own little circle and see the same things happening half-way around the world. I had spoken online to a few of the conference attendees thru mailing lists or jabber, but nothing strikes it home like meeting face-to-face with our fellow hackers across the world. It’s amazing to think that we are all hacking away to improve the same global body of software.
So hack freely.