This post is more about whole event than about the second day of it. But the second day was most important because it lasted whole day. And it had 10 talks instead of 3 (like it was on Friday and Sunday).
Second presentation was about profiling PHP applications by Derick Rethans. It was second presentation of Derick at this edition of PHPCon Poland. It was something like introduction to different tools. Some of them were simple benchmarkers: siege, vmstat, other tracing tools such as Xdebug and ValaXdebug. The last profiler which was presented is called XHProf. Hard to setup in your system but pretty useful and nice looking. I think this presentation wasn’t bad but I didn’t find it really interesting. I could learn this tools when I’ll be needing them 
Next speaker woke me up 
It was David Coallier who presented us a little bit of history of PHP and talked about its future. He mentioned new features in PHP 5.3: namespaces, closures & lambda’s functions, Phar, DateTime, SPL, FPM, Collator… lots of them. Most of them I shortly described in my previous post.
Talked a little bit about quite good PHP frameworks developed during last few years: Symfony2, ZendFramework, Lithium. David told us that “Symfony people are dicks!” Of course it shouldn’t be taken as an insult. It was something positive. Meaning: those guys respect their users’ feedback and change their product according to it. I got interested here with Lithium framework (previous CakePHP) and the aspect oriented programming (I need to read more about it!).
He finished the talk by saying: “Evolution is bringing PHP developers to clouds”.
Stephan Hochdörfer was next and he talked about testing untestable code. He told us the presentation wouldn’t be about testing it would be about being creative. However, I got a little bit more sure that I don’t have a tester soul, and probably because of that I saw there only examples of mocking different types of things: database connections, web services, file systems, mail servers etc. Maybe it’d be more interesting if I’d have written more unit tests.
Next talk I attended that day was about graph databases. Two positive Italians told us about GraphDB. They started with basics from graph domain, such as: vertex, edge, path. Explained what GraphDB is and why we should sometimes use it (index-free adjacency) and finally they told us about OrientDB. They showed us a bunch of tools we could use to “play” with the OrientDB but all of those tools are for Java language. But Alessandro and David are PHP passionates and they wanted to encourage us to help them with congow/Orient library on which they work.
Last presentation I saw on the second day was about internationalization in general (and a little bit in our company). It was prepared by my colleague and in my humble opinion it was one of very few polish talks which could easily be compared to our foreigners’ talks. TOR showed few really funny examples of how hard it is to translate something if you don’t know the context and how easy it is when you have thousand of volunteers willing to translate something for you After this talk we decided to get some rest and visit conference room on the other day.
On Sunday it was really hard to get up. Mostly because we went really late to our beds since we spent lots of hours in the bar chatting with other programmers/speakers. However, I made it and after quick breakfast, I went to see the first talk on Sunday. It was about upgrading ourselves. Lorna Mitchell, who we met in the bar, gave a really nice talk about how to invest in your team skills. It wasn’t something the audience didn’t know. But the end of her talk, the questions’ part, showed that polish IT businessmen need lots of more talks like this one. One of the questions was: “OK, but what if I invest in my team, I’ll send them to courses, they’ll got the skills and decide not to work for me anymore because with those skills they can get more money somewhere else?”. It shows how closed to the world our businessmen are. And it’s sad that they can’t see with a little bit more wider angle
After this talk I decided to have a break and to get back for the last one which was about traits in PHP 5.4. I was disappointed — again ;/ It was nothing more that we can read in PHP Manual. After 15 minutes we decided to pack our backpacks and go home.
We all agreed it wasn’t something we expected. However after quick chatting with the organizer we hope next year it’ll be better because even if it didn’t fulfilled our expectations it was better than last year (as I heard) and we wish the trend will keep afloat.
See you on PHPCon Poland 2012!