OSCON highlight numero uno

One quick highlight from OSCON: on Tuesday night, right after my tutorial, I was lucky enough to attend the Portland PHP User's Group, where they had arranged an all-star PHP line up, including Rasmus, Andrei, Wez, Marcus, Ilia, George, Laura, Adam, Ben, Luke, Shane, John, Stefan, Terry, and Chris-- well-documented by Terry's photos. Oddly enough, a good third of the ensuing discussion actually focused more on JavaScript and AJAX than it did on PHP... ah well, that's what's interesting these days, I suppose, and of course when you have that group of people to talk to you're mining a wealth of information beyond just PHP.

A special moment for me: during the round of introductions of this group of PHP luminaries, a few of the real forces behind PHP (Wez, Ilia, Marcus, Andrei) insisted I introduce myself as well. I was very surprised, very honoured, and managed to mumble something about my early work with PHP at IBM with DB2, writing most of the PDO docs, and saying how much I enjoyed hanging out / working with this great group of people. All very true, but I certainly hope to be able to contribute more to the community in the future.