We had the very good fortune of attending the first CakePHP workshop, in Raleigh, NC this weekend. Four of the core developers of the project where there, including the project manger and the lead developer; along with one of the guys behind jquery-UI. The non-presenters ranged from people who had never used We had the very good fortune of attending the first CakePHP workshop, in Raleigh, NC this weekend. Four of the core developers of the project where there, including the project manger and the lead developer; along with one of the guys behind jquery-UI. The non-presenters ranged from people who had never used to people who had been using it for a couple of years.
The presentations were fantastic, often just building a project live, explaining their steps and choices and debugging as they went. In addition, there was a second room where the hosts who were not presenting were happy to go over specific problems, questions, and code, as well as talking about coding approaches or testing or pretty much anything else. The one-on-one time was incredibly useful both technically and it was invaluable to put faces on names.
Since it was just a bunch of geeks, we ended up all going out to dinner and hanging out in the hotel lobby until 2am, talking about code and projects and whatever else (HttpSocket). The Cake guys were very friendly, open, and encouraging – actually liking some of our work we showed them (at least faking it well). More importantly, they were very quick with suggestions and information and all sorts of tricks and techniques which would have taken weeks or months of research to discover on our own.
All in all, the cost was dirt cheap for what we got out of it and we are very much looking forward to a future “advanced” workshop next year.
Thanks Guys (and Cindy),
