After that I attended various sessions about the Zend framework given by the Software Architect, Matthew Weier O’Phinney. We had a catered lunch that was good. During the afternoon I attended a really good presentations on PDO by Wez Furlong, The State of Ajax by Paul Reinheimer and ended with Test Driven Development by Derick Rethans. After the session were over, Brett and I attended the welcome reception which had an open bar…sweet. Then he and I went for some sushi and gin & tonics. BTW…if you have never tried sea urchin…don’t. Trust Me, it was like licking the bottom of a fish tank. We then decided to hang out in the hotel planning out today’s schedule. At some point we got hungry and had to walk to a near by gas station where the shady attendant was paranoid and only allowed one of us in to shop. I think we finally crashed at around 3 am. Overall it was an exciting day. Stay tuned for Day 3.

Well, Brett and I have arrived today at the Santa Clara Convention Center to attend ZendCon. I have not blogged in a while so I am going to try and update with little bits and pieces of how the conference is going. Today is the pre-conference where they are offering a couple of tutorial sessions. This morning I took the session on Introduction Object Oriented PHP, because I never really had an official class on it. It was a great crash course with a lot of information. It was almost overwhelming, but luckily we were able to download the slides and I will be reviewing the information later. The presenter was Marcus Burger, who works for Google in Zurich. The afternoon session was about better and advanced techniques for using SQL query language with specific to mySQL. The presenter is actually someone who works for mySQL, Jay Pipes.

Tomorrow, Brett will be presenting right after the opening keynote speech. His topic will be about Facebook Development using the Zend Framework. If you know Brett or even if you don’t, please wish him luck! Well that is it for now. I will try to keep everyone updated as the conference goes on.

Wanted to take a moment and congratulate my best friend Brett for being accepted as a presenter at ZendCon 2008. He has worked hard to develop his toolset primary for Facebook development titled the FBFramework that is built on top of the Zend platform.

Brett and I have been friends for more than 5 years and I am glad to see him succeed in what he loves to do. Head on over to his website for more in depth knowledge of the framework and updates on his presentation at ZendCon 2008.