From May 16th to May 19th the latest edition of jsDay and phpDay took place in Verona, Italy. Both are two-day conferences, the first one centered around JavaScript, the second around PHP (obviously). They are organised by the community ( Grusp) which means they are much more focused on technology than on marketing. A number of Liipers were attending one or both conferences and some where even giving talks.

jsDay

JsDay directly started with a mindblowing talk by Mark Boas (The slides can be found here). He demonstrated his technique called “hyperaudio” which he uses to enhance audio content on the web with semantic information. Doing so he makes the audio content both crawlable by bots and accessible by visually impaired people. Also this technique gives great possibilities in terms of user interaction: It gets possible to highlight the currently spoken words, to spool exactly to a certain word or to switch the language of an audio file while it is playing.

Another highlight of jsDay clearly was JavaScript messiah Douglas Crockfords Keynote. He spoke about the functionality of our brain and why it makes it so hard for us to step away from subjective criteria when it comes to programming style.

In general the trends in the JavaScript world are all around emerging technologies like in browser data storage, 3D CSS transformations and the yet not mature native audio / video handling. A big topic was  node.js which had a handful of talks devoted to it. Another trend in the JS microcosmos is the movement from simple libraries to ingenious JavaScript frameworks, as client heavy applications grow more and more complex.

phpDay

There have been a lot of interesting talks by people from the PHP community. The spectrum of talks covered a lot of ground, from highly technical aspects like how to build PHP extensions to more social or organisational aspects with talks about agile workflow and team communication. Below you find a list of the most remarkable talks:

Sum-Up

As always at conferences, a lot of interesting talks also happened at the infamous ‘hallway track' and at the social events where we met many interesting people from all Europe and the states. The conference was really well organised by Grusp and the talks were well balanced.

team phpDay

At the social event on the phpDay we made a picture of all attending Liipers. Unfortunately Mirco wasn't around so Derick Rethans (!!) kindly agreed to play the body double for him :-)

The next jsDay/phpDay will take place again next year from May 16th to 19th. We really recommend to go to at least one of the conferences if not both. If you go you'd do well to reserve some time to visit the beautiful city of Verona.

Notice

Unfortunately, during the end of our stay two major incidents occurred in Italy which shocked the whole country. Our thoughts go out to all the people affected by those tragedies.