It’s always fun to be a part of a conference’s first year. This year, I was lucky enough to speak at the inaugural SkiPHP Conference in Salt Lake City, UT. Since the conference was very micro-framework friendly, I was able to present my own Bullet PHP Micro-Framework. The talk went well, was very well recieved, and got very highly rated on Joind.in. The talk (and Bullet itself) presents some interesting ideas that I was very happy to be able to share in a conference talk format.

Overall, the conference was great. It was very well put together, and very well run. The orgainzers sent lots of emails ahead of time letting us know what was going on, and took care of speakers very well – even having breakfast ready for us each morning in the speaker lounge (something that was very much appreciated by myself and many other speakers as well). I thought the talk selection was good as well – there were more sessions at this conference that I was personally interested in atending than I have in while at many other conferences over the years.

Huge thanks and kudos go to the SkiPHP organizers – I hope this is a sign of good things from the Salt Lake City PHP community, and I hope there are many more sucessful years of this conference ahead.

Bullet: The Functional PHP Micro-Framework

My presentation slides are avaialble on Slideshare, though I am not sure how enlightening they will be without the audio. For this particular talk of mine, the audio context is pretty important. Luckily, my entire talk was recorded on video, so I will post that here when available.

Post-Conference Activities

Half the fun of a conference is all the activities surrounding it, and all the people you meet and talk to who are also there. At SkiPHP, the main event was obvious – skiing! A small group of us stayed an extra day or two after the conference to hit the slopes at Snowbird.

Pictured (Front): Adam Culp, Ben Edmonds, Chris Boden, Josh Adell (Back) Paul Jones, Vance Lucas, John Coggeshall

Paul Jones and I started with the beginner course and stayed on the “Chickadee” hill since it was our first time snow skiing, but the other guys hit the real slopes, and have much better, more majestic mountanside pictures and views to share. I did manage to take a good selfie on the ski lift though!

Selfie on the ski lift at Snowbird in Salt Lake City, UT

Wrapping Up

All in all, my time at SkiPHP was a blast. The Salt Lake City PHP community really came together to put on a great conference and show their support for events like this in their backyard. I am already looking forward to submitting again next year! Maybe I can try some green slopes this time :).