I was fortunate enough to be selected as the regional speaker for the Dallas CodeWorks 2009 stop by the Dallas PHP User Group through a community voting and selection process. My talk was entitled Object Oriented Apologetics , and was essentially about letting people know what good object-oriented code is, when to use it, how to use it, and more specifically why to use it over traditional procedural PHP code. more

Object Oriented Apologetics

In defense of object-oriented programming – How and why you should use object oriented programming for your next project.This talk is for PHP programmers who are just learning about object oriented code, who cling to old excuses("object oriented code is slower"), or who are otherwise unconvinced of its usefulness. Concrete real-world examples of commonscenarios and challenges that programmers face will be presented, and how taking an object oriented approach is better than a proceduralone in most cases. Copious code examples in both object oriented and procedural approaches will be provided throughout, and thedifferences and benefits of the object oriented approach will be explained.

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The CodeWorks Experience

All in all, the CodeWorks roadshow Dallas stop was much smaller than I expected. There were about 20 people in the talk I gave. I suppose it was both a good a bad thing. On one hand, I had a lot of fun connecting with the other speakers and attendees on a more personal level than I would have had the opportunity to do otherwise. I met a lot of new people in the PHP community that I will probably stay connected with on some level, even if it is just Twitter and IRC. We had a lot of fun the night before the presentation day eating together and hanging out.

On the other hand, I know that as a business, the relatively low attendance levels coupled with the high travel expenses could mean that something like this can’t happen again, which is a shame. This was one of the best efforts I have seen in a while to really lower the price of the conference for attendees by bringing the speakers directly to their cities or at least ones that are close by. Going to ZendCon, for instance, could easily cost up to $2,500 for the whole trip with airfare, hotel stays, and food, if not more.

The bottom line here is that CodeWorks was a good conference that offered a great value for your money. I had a great time meeting and connecting with new people and finally meeting people in real life that I had been communicating with for years. I learned some new things and finally got the kick in the pants I needed to jump into Test Driven Development, thanks to Jason Sweat’s TDD tutorial and hand-holding.

Now I’m just looking forward to php|tek in May 2010.