Spring has sprung and so has conference season!

Spring has sprung here in Chicago and that means getting on the road! I’m coming to see you!
Actually, everybody at Zend is excited about all the new announcements and events coming up so I thought I would run some of them down for you. You can always get the latest on the most recent events from the Zend Event Calendar and the monthly newsletter. But a little nudge every once in a while doesn’t hurt.

While I love to run around the country and the world to spread the good news about PHP on IBM i, the real value for me is meeting a bunch of AWESOME people. These folks really understand systems if they have an IBM i we can instantly click. I spend a great deal of time in and out of sessions helping to marry these folks with that awesome infrastructure with a contemporary language like PHP. It is truly a luxury, but don’t tell my boss because he’ll think I am having too much fun. Plus I have an awesome collection on miniature shampoo bottles from hotels around the world.

This month I will be heading to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for the annual WMCPA Conference on March 20-23. Here are some folks who not only understand the value of PHP (Their website is Joomla running on IBM i) they also support a fantastic educational event with headlining speakers like Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Pete Massiello and PHP evangelist Alan Seiden, just to name a few. I’ll be doing a couple of presentations and a PHP workshop! Stop by the Zend booth.

Next, I follow Jon and Susan down to Ft Worth, TX for the semi-annual RPG & DB2 Summit. This event draws out some of the strongest RPG programmers I have ever met. Many of whom are interested in moving forward with PHP as well as RPG and that is just perfect. These folks will really appreciate the new open source toolkit bundled into Zend Server 5.6 to leverage legacy RPG business logic.

A quick trip to the bay area to stop by HQ and then I am off to Framingham(Boston), MA for the annual NEUGC conference on April 2-4. This is one of the biggest events in the Northeast that will focus on IBM i centric technology. This will be my first appearance at this event and I hope not the last. We will be running a hands on PHP workshop as well as several sessions on PHP content.

There may be a few pother events beforehand but let’s not forget the big one, the COMMON Annual Meeting in Anaheim on May 6-9. Zend will have a booth and I will be doing several sessions and maybe a biggie on Zend DBi, the new MySQL distribution from Zend Technologies. With over a dozen sessions on PHP and hundreds of sessions on IBM i and AIX content, this is sure to be the biggest event in the US. I have seen many great activities planned around the conference so make plans to be in Disneyland this week!

What about outside of the US? Well, Vienna is supposed to be very nice in June! Yes, COMMON Europe will be holding their annual event in Vienna Austria this year on June 9-12 and Zend will be there for the festivities. With presentations, a booth and several events we expect this to help COMMON celebrate 50 years in Europe!

Have I ever mentioned that all those website links in the previous text are pointing to PHP applications? The COMMON and WMCPA sites actually run on IBM i!

So hopefully I will be around your neck of the woods soon. If not, drop me a line and let’s see if I can swing by! I live for user groups and more!