Visiting PFCongres in Zwolle

Last weekend was the fifth edition of the PHP oriented congres PFCongres organized by the Dutch PHP user group PHPFreakz. I have attended almost all their congresses since 2006 and over the years, the organization became more and more professional. This year, that resulted in the z of PFCongrez (as the earlier congresses were called) being dropped in favor of the more professional s. Also, for the first time, there were 14 speakers. The first in 2006 had only three or so. I went with some old colleagues from iWink in Groningen. It was nice seeing them again.

The level of speakers and visitors of the congres was pretty varied. For example, I attended a seminar about automated web site vulnerability management. It sounds pretty advanced but unfortunately a lot of time was spend discussing the basics of two frequent security problems in PHP applications: cross-site scripting and SQL-injection. Many attendees had questions about this, but developers who use PHP professionally do not have to be reminded of the importance of escaping user input. The time could have been spend on discussing more obscure security problems, or on the actual topic of the seminar: discussing automated vulnerability management.

All in all, it was still pretty fun. I attended the seminars about Adobe Flash Catalyst, dependency injection, automated web site vulnerability management, software development at the NOS, domain specific languages in PHP, testing untestable code, SCRUM and PHP and Microsoft. The first and latter were, pretty predictable, pitches for new commercial products. The others were quite interesting, although not all speakers were not as good in presenting as they were knowledgeable.

The whole conference got me thinking about how much I miss programming. The last eight months I have spend writing my master thesis for Psychology and being an intern interaction designer at ABN AMRO. In order to be able to do that, I have had to quit my job as a developer. I an having a great time, but I do miss programming. I have got to find a nice side project, perhaps an open source project. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments.