Driven Interactive

Today was the first day of php|tek 2007. After 2 1/2 years of programming PHP I am happy to have the opportunity to attend my first conference. Thanks Palantir!

Click here for photos of the event.

Crash Course

Today is a special add-on tutorial day. Since I decided to take the Zend PHP 5 Certification exam (free with your conference registration) I attended both sessions of the Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course presented by Paul Reinheimer. I had already read the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide so I wasn't expecting anything new, just a different way to consume the material and keep it on the top of my head before taking the exam. Plus it never hurts to pick the brain of one of the authors of the exam right before taking it!

For most programmers a big portion of this session would be a boring review of strings and arrays and operators... yada yada yada. But you can always pick up something new. For instance, did you know you can access the third character of a string like this?:

$string = 'abcd';
echo $string[2]; // c

And do you remember exactly how a do/while loop works? Little refreshers like this were nice to pick up right before the exam.

The Exam

Considering the industry we are in I was surprised that the exam was administered on paper. Other than not getting my results immediately it was actually kind of nice to take the exam the old fashioned way. We were given 90 minutes to answer 70 multiple choice and fill in the blank questions. We also had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which I hope I didn't violate here!

As a completely self taught programmer (I'm a business major) becoming a Zend Certified Engineer would be kind of a big deal for me. I'll let you know how I did!

Looking forward to tomorrow

The real conference starts tomorrow with a keynote from PHP originator Rasmus Lerdorf. I've heard his talks are interesting and entertaining to say the least. I'll keep you posted.