In July, I’m speaking at OSCON. Actually I have a few interesting speaking engagements coming up, and I haven’t got around to adding upcoming dates to my blog yet but I’ll be at phpDay in Verona next week with a talk on API Design and DPC in Amsterdam in June with a tutorial on Web Services and a talk on what OAuth is actually for.

OSCON is special because I have always wanted to go and never imagined it would actually happen. Every year I read the list of sessions from the year before, and decide that I absolutely must submit to the call for papers, regardless of how small I think my chances of being accepted are! I’ve submitted a couple of times in the past, excluding last year because I was newly freelance (OSCON does not cover any speaker expenses at all, they just give you a conference pass. That’s kind of hard going for those of us self-funding halfway across the world, and last year, I just couldn’t do it. This year I still can’t really justify it but I’m going anyway!)

I have two talks, both of them brand new, and I’m excited about them both!

PHP 5.4 Features You’ll Actually Use

When I told one of my local user groups (how excellent to have more than one local user group!) about this talk they said “that’ll be a short talk” and I am a little worried they are right! Cool new array syntax, traits, and a web server … am I missing anything important? To make this even easier and more fun, Rasmus has the slot immediately before mine and his abstract includes “a detailed review of new PHP 5.4 features”. I feel like a spare part and I haven’t even written the talk yet!

Get Some Rest: Best RESTful API Practices

This one will be lots of fun, because I firmly believe in writing services that make users, rather than textbooks, very happy. Which means that I do break the rules and I think there are times when that’s acceptable. I suspect that there will be heckling, flaming, and foaming at the mouth involved but hey, I’m not there to be popular! Honestly, I love REST, I think it’s possible to take it too far, and I’m only a little bit scared to say that in public :)

OSCON Conversations

OSCON does a cool thing where it opens the comments on a talk page immediately – which means that you can already go and ask questions, make requests, or leave comments on either my PHP 5.4 talk or the RESTful one and let me know what you do (and perhaps do NOT) want to hear. If you’re going to OSCON or are just interested in the topics, I’m interested to hear your thoughts, either over here in the comments or over on the talks themselves!