It's just past 5AM as I start writing this. I'm sitting downstairs in the ZendCon hotel, with a view on an empty bar and brightly coloured gambling machines. Since I woke up at 3AM (don't you love jetlag?) and today is the day I travel back home, I've been reflecting on the conference. I'll be missing a few sessions because I had to leave early, but I've already gotten a lot of new stuff to ponder about, my head is pretty full. Time to let it sink in a bit.

As I was pondering the lessons of this conference, I thought back to the last talk of yesterday, Exploiting the brain for fun and profit by Alena Holligan. One of the things Alena talked about was how you can improve your learning. One of the things she mentioned was teaching others. Teaching others really helps you to learn stuff yourself. But the other thing was: Write it down. Writing things down will help you to not forget stuff. She even mentioned the situation I've been in a couple of times: Googling for a problem only to end up on your own blog, where you discuss the solution. As such, I'm writing down some of my lessons of ZendCon. So I won't forget, and hopefully to help others learn about this stuff as well.

Let's start with the opening keynote by Andi Gutmans and Rod Cope. Andi and Rod looked back at where we came from and where we're going with technology. While the picture for the future that was painted sounded awesome for users, it sounded horrible for privacy. I'm really curious to see where this will be going.

I also attended the Composer for corporate use talk that Stephan Hochdörfer did. One of the things I learned from that talk is the composer license command, which gives you an overview of the licenses used by your dependencies. Related to that, I also learned about VersionEye, which seems like an interesting service. That is now on my list of things to check out.

I was really looking forward to see Uncle Bob do a keynote at ZendCon, and this turned out to be an amazing keynote. He gave a nice overview of some common patterns from the past as well as the present. It also taught me that at my current project we're doing pretty well for some of these topics. There's always room for improvement, but we're on the right track. It is good to get that kind of confirmation.

Next to the talks I also had a nice chat with some of the sponsors at their booths. My most important lesson there was the Clean Coders video platform. Before ZendCon I was not aware it even existed, but with a lot of material delivered by people like Uncle Bob, Corey Haines and Michael Norton on topics such as architecture, technical debt, testing, SOLID etc it looks like an amazing opportunity.

It has been another amazing ZendCon, and I'm bringing the lessons back home with me.