Joining the PHP BBQ in Hamburg and Kiel

There must be something that gets coders and barbecue together. In Australia, I was invited to a hackers barbecue, while at FrOSCon, the Saturday evening meal is a grill fest. It seems just right that the PHP coders in Germany are getting together with a BBQ Tour, starting on Monday, June 15, and touching seven German towns in one week.

I will join the happy campers on Saturday, June 20, in Hamburg, and finish off the tour in Kiel the next day.
The event is open. However, for logistic reasons, a registration is required in some of them. Check the schedule for more details.
Being informal events, we may or may not have presentations and demos, but being inter-geek meetings, there will be some fun and mutual learning for sure. I look forward for it. Most of my "aha" technical moments came during serendipitous social gatherings. Beer and food are great science conductors!
Follow FrOSCon on Twitter and OpenSQLCamp on Twitter for more updates.

The ephemeral glory of books

A picture says it all. Special offers at a FrOSCon books booth.
For how long is an IT book in its prime?

Reason #3 to attend the MySQL UC2008

Disclaimer: Forget about my affiliation, this is my personal list of things that I am going to enjoy at the UC. #3 Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit

Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergman to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of this session you will wonder how could you have survived for years without unit testing.
PHP programmers, mark your calendars!


More reasons:

• #4 A Tour of External Language Stored Procedures for MySQL
• #5 Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking
• #6 Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community
• #7 MySQL Proxy: the complete tutorial