PHPNW08 will differ a bit from a lot of other conferences I’ve been to, in that it’s not a big commercial conference but a community-driven one. Though one could argue that the Dutch PHP Conference has a very community-feel to it, it is still only organized by one commercial organization, where PHPNW is a true usergroup conference such as we hope to have in the Netherlands one day with the PHP UserGroup here.

Anyway, so, what’s going to happen at the conference. It will all start on friday night with the pre-conference social. I’ve heard some strong rumours that there will be some Mario Kart there, which should be fun. But as fun as Mario Kart will be, I am very much looking forward to meeting such people as Rob Allen, Ciaran Walsh, Stuart Herbert and Steph Fox as well as re-meeting Derick, Zoe, Johannes, Arpad, Ivo, Scott, Felix, Lorna, and everyone else that I’m forgetting right now 😉 To me, meeting the community is probably even more fun than attending sessions and speaking. I know, I’m a community addict.

As for the sessions, my plans are as follows:

Derick Rethans’ KISS keynote
MySQL EXPLAIN Explained by Adrian Hardy
Regular Expression Basics by Ciaran Walsh
What’s new, what’s hot in PHP5.3 by Johannes Schluter
obviously – my own talk
Arpad Ray’s Exploiting PHP with PHP
Panel Discussion: State of the Community

I am already sure that it will be an excellent weekend, and am very much looking forward to it. I hope to see a lot of people there, have interesting discussions, convince people that refactoring is a good thing, and mainly: have fun!