Johannes Schlüter

Over the last few weeks I had been quite silent, but that's about to change: Over the next few weeks I'll give a few presentations. Feel free to join any of those.

• January, 18th: Erstellung hochperformanter PHP-Anwendungen mit MySQL (German)
  MySQL Webinar, Online
• February, 9th: MySQL Konnectoren (German)
  OTN Developer Day: MySQL, Frankfurt, Germany
• February 24th/25th: PHP under the hood (English)
  PHP UK Conference, London, UK

This year I'll attend OSCON for the first time. I'll give two talks:

• PHP and MySQL - Recent Developments
  PHP’s MySQL support recently received many changes under the hood. PHP 5.3 introduced mysqlnd – the MySQL native driver which is a replacement for libmysql deeply bound into PHP. In this presentation you will learn what the PHP and MySQL development teams were up to. After starting with an introduction of the PHP-stack, demystifying things like mysqli, mysqlnd or PDO, this presentation will show you how to build mysqlnd plugins as PHP C extension and hooking into mysqlnd from PHP userland. It will also discuss existing plugins like a client side query cache or a module for doing read-write-splitting, both working transparently, without changes to your application.
• PHP Under the hood
  The beauty of PHP is that everybody can read the code and see the inner workings of software. But understanding concepts from reading code isn’t often helpful. Especially if you are no pro in that language. This presentation will take apart many parts of the PHP runtime, describe the concepts behind so attendees understand the inner workings without actually reading C code. Concepts covered include HashTables, the foundation for PHP arrays and many other internal data structures, the reference counting mechanism, which is important for writing efficient code as well as the overall executor.

In case you can't make it to these talks but want to talk to me you'll probably find me at the Oracle booth where I'll also try to give some short talks on some topics to be defined (any wishes?)

 In case you're not interested in me and my talks but MySQL there are a few sessions by other MySQL Engineers:

• MySQL Replication Update
• InnoDB: Performance and Scalability Features
• Python Utilities for Managing MySQL Databases
• The MySQL Time Machine

In case you want to attend you can use the code os11fos which should give you a 20% discount.

Recently I gave a few public presentations and started to convert the slides for making them available online. Here's the first bunch with slides from two conferences which were held in October, the International PHP Conference in Germany and PHP Barcelona in Spain. As always: The spoken word is missing on the slides ...
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Oh time is flying! - This weekend it is already time for FrOSCon, the Free and Open source Conference in St. Augustin close to Western Germany's former capitol Bonn. The conference consists out of a main track and different side tracks, like the PHP developer room and the OpenSQL sub-conference.

In the PHP developer room I will give an overview over things that happened at MySQL, especially in regards to PHP in recent times. My colleague Ulf Wendel will then go and talk about plugins to mysqlnd - the MySQL native driver for PHP -  in detail.

In the OpenSQL Camp track you can find other interesting MySQL related talks which will, unfortunately, not leave you with enough time to watch all the interesting talks of the other tracks. And that all for an entrance fee of just 5€! So if you have a chance: Go there and say hi!

I forgot to announce some talks in the past here but the next bunch are already scheduled:

• Next week I'll attend PHP Quebec and talk about PHP 5.3 and, together with my friend Marcus, PHP Worst Practices. Really looking forward to this conference.
• In April I'll give an introduction to DTrace at the OenSoure Datacenter Conference in Nuremberg, Germany
• DTrace, with a focus on the AMP stack, will also be a topic at the Spring edition of the International PHP conference in Berlin. There I'll also present some Hidden Gems in PHP 5.3.

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of Mörfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the conference, so if you're looking for an open source PHP IDE you might talk to Petr and Wen about the upcoming NetBeans 6.5 release which will feature PHP support, if you're running a startup company you might talk to Stefan Schneider who will represent the Startup Essential Program which has interesting discounts on Sun products.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend Brian Aker's keynote about Drizzle or Ulf's session about new and hot stuff in mysqlnd, one of the new feature in PHP 5.3.

hm, I haven't blogged for a while, and no, Twitter, which I still don't get, is not an excuse, maybe I don't like telling every tiny thing I do, maybe that's the reason I don't get twitter ... anyways: In roughly 10 hrs I'll leave to St. Augustin to attend FrOSCon and give a presentation about PHP 5.3. Pre-Registration is closed but tickets (5 Euro for two days of fun) can be bought right at the entrance.

Short notice: I plan to attend the PHP Unconference at Hamburg, April 26th/27th. I also plan to offer two topics there:

• An inroduction to .phpt testing as preparation for the to-be-announced TestFest at php.net and
• some ranting and Q&A session in the hope to destroy some FUD and myths about PHP.

More about these topics can be found in the nice announcement Tobias wrote, more Infomation at the unconference's page. (both links are German)

Currently I'm at MySQL's staff meeting at Orlando. As you most likely read: Our CEO Marten Mickos announced that SUN is going to buy MySQL AB. I joined MySQL just in October and it's the first time for me to go to a company meeting, so I'm still in some kind of orientation phase, meeting many people where I only knew the name and now the company becomes way bigger. But I'm not only having the chance to meet people from MySQL now, but SUN also sent a bunch of guys over to Orlando, so Ulf, Andrey and me from MySQL's PHP team had James Gosling joining our table at lunch - but I won't go and do Java now, I'll stay with PHP

A few weeks ago I've already blogged about me presenting my performance talk at the Intl. PHP Conference in november. Meanwhile the other two talks have been confirmed: First I'll support Marcus at the almost traditional Code Camp at Night - the perfect place to learn about PHP internals. On tuesday evening I'll present a 15 minutes quick talk about PHP's command line interface. See you there.

After hanging around on the PHP Conference at Frankfurt Mörfelden the last three years without giving a talk I decided to propose something for this year's edition and was recently informed that my proposal has been accepted. Therefore I'll be giving my talk "Run PHP, Run" where I'll present some ways of analyzing and improving PHP performance.

Falls es jemand noch nicht gesehen hat: Udo Vetter am 23C3:

Recently Gabor Szabo, the organizer of the Open Source Developrs' Conference, Isreal, informed me that they cancelled next year's conference. I planed to give a PHP talk there and hope for a later chance.

Next weekend I'll join Wolfram and a few other friends and attend the BarCamp at Nürnberg. If you plan to go there, too, put your name on the list of participants.

Since Wednesday I'm back from this year's PHP Cofnerence at Frnakfurt. As always it was great fun and it's time to write a short recap. Read More