Last weekend I was at the PHPBenelux 2011 conference in Antwerp. As conferences go it was pretty awesome, completely surpassing my expectations in many ways! The schedule was published in advance but I somehow forgot how many friends I have in that part of the world and what a wonderful crowd there is at this event. My hearty congratulations to all the organisers and my thanks to everyone who attended – they used joind.in for the feedback and there are plenty of comments on there too, which I now consider a metric of how engaged a community is!

I was at the conference to give a keynote with ex-colleague and good friend Ivo Jansch. We gave our new talk “27 Ways To Be a Better Developer” in the opening keynote slot, which was a lot of fun (even if I did freak out slightly and hide in the middle). Ivo and I have lots of experience of working with developers, recruiting, running teams, and we had a great time working out *which* 27 items to include and how to tell the story. It was a little bit hectic since we had about 50 minutes to give the talk but we had some generous reviews and so many people have come and told me about one or two points that have made a big impact on them. These are the slides:

Thanks again to all who made this event what it was – organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees!

Have you got your tickets for PHPBenelux yet? If not then I hope you will do so because I would love to see you there!

I’ll be delivering a keynote at the PHPBenelux Conference in Antwerp in January alongside my good friend Ivo Jansch. Between us we’ve got plenty of stories to tell from our experiences in various areas of development and we’d like to share those with you! I hope you’ll come along and join us, and if you are quick you can catch the early bird prices, saving 50 euro.

On a personal note I have many great friends in this part of the world and I’m super-excited to know that I’m able to visit and see both the old friends I know well and the new friends I haven’t met yet. I attended this conference last year and it had a great atmosphere; this year the content is better again and with three tracks, I don’t know how we’ll choose which sessions to see!

Are you attending? Leave a comment and make sure to come and say hi at the conference in Belgium :)