Ok, I'm a little travelled out with recent trips to around the US visiting customers, the Gartner conference and a trip to Europe for our developer meeting in Germany. So I'm glad that the upcoming Zend PHP conference (Oct 8-11) is in the bay area. I've been to this conference the last few years and it's a good one. Not as large as the MySQL conference, but if you're into PHP, it's got all the technical meat you Ok, I’m a little travelled out with recent trips to around the US visiting customers, the Gartner conference and a trip to Europe for our developer meeting in Germany. So I’m glad that the upcoming Zend PHP conference (Oct 8-11) is in the bay area. I’ve been to this conference the last few years and it’s a good one. Not as large as the MySQL conference, but if you’re into PHP, it’s got all the technical meat you could want, and then some.I expect the Zend execs (Harold Goldberg, Andi Guttmans and Mark DeVisser) will kick things off with some updates on what’s happening in the PHP Community in general as well as what’s coming in new products from Zend. The Zend Framework has come a long way in the last year and is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds, and there will be plenty of sessions on that.Also there will be good keynotes by Cory Doctorow and Joel Spolsky. Cory’s a fascinating guy. He’s an award-winning sf author and former director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I’ve seen Cory speak before and I think he’s got a great view on software, privacy and the need for dissent. It sounds weird, but it’s actually very interesting and relevant. Joel’s going to be talking about what it takes to build great software. (I just wish he’d update CityDesk, a great web publishing tool that has gone stale in recent years. I think the last update was in 1976 or something. Heck, maybe the Zend crowd can convince him to rewrite it in PHP and open source it.)Tutorials start on Monday covering Security, Certification, Best practices and Extending PHP. The full program starts on Tuesday with the keynote and sessions following on the Zend framework, using MemCacheD, high performance scaling techniques for PHP and MySQL, Web Services and more. There are lots of good hard core sessions as well as a few case studies and some sessions by gurus like Jay Pipes and Brian Aker from MySQL, Bill Karwin from Zend, Eli White from Digg.com and others. I am sure some of these sessions will fill up early, so I recommend registering in advance. Heck, you’ll save some money over the on-site registration also. Open Source