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.

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)

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.

Over the last two weeks I had the chance of going to concerts of three of my favorite music acts. In chronological order:

• August 25th: For the first time I went to see Seeed (Wikipedia) at Berlin: A really great show and a really good sound system which made it possible to hear every single percussion stuff while also having a good bass. Really great show even though one could feel that they were looking forward to their one year break. If you have a chance for attending one of their concerts and like dancehall music: Go for it!
• September 1st: For the third time I visited a concert of Dendemann (WP), the second time with his Die Pfütze des Eisbergs program. Therefore there wasn't new stuff for me but still a nice show (and for free )
• September 4th: For the second time I was at a Kinderzimmer Productions (WP) concert. Since I didn't have the current album, Asphalt, yet (I bought it after the show) there was really quite some new stuff for me. Inside the concert hall it was quite hot which led, in combination with my dancing, to a quite wet T-Shirt unfortunately I wasn't able to buy a Kinderzimmer Productions T-Shirt since they were sold out. Damn. (While I'd prefer a sweater but they didn't even offer them...) _{(And I'm sure that concert was way better than NIN where Thorsten was)}

Letztes Wochenende war ich zu Besuch im Bundeskanzleramt, was da eigentlich so passiert weiß man ja auch nciht so genau als einfacher Bürger. Nunja, es wird die Merkel bei Ihrer Arbeit unterstützt, was auch immer das beduetet. Die aktuelle Regierung nun hatte ja das Arbeits- und das Wirtschaftsministerium wieder getrennt, klar, zu vial Aufgaben für ein Ministerium, aber was macht das Wirtschaftsministerium eigentlich? - Nun, u.a. interessante Studien über Brottüten vom Bäcker, wie man bei der FAZ lesen kann. (Jaja, ich weiß, die machen auch wichtigere Dinge, so gehört das Bundeskartellamt zu denen, oder die PTB, die dafür sorgt, dass unsere Uhren richtig gehen und viel mehr)

This night I came back from a trip to Kaunas (Lithuania) where my friend Johann and me gave some security consulting. Although I didn't see much of the country (basically I just saw the Hotel, some office building and a shopping mall) it was a nice trip which also produced some media attention in the Lithuanian press.

Just swim 5,572 km through the Atlantic to drive from Hamburg to New York:

(Via Zeit Google Blog)

From Monday till Wednesday I've been on a short trip to Barcelona and had quite some fun while my feet hurt from walking all day.

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.