The PHP Summer Camp (yeah, it was in summer, but I have been on holidays between the conferences, hence I only write about it now) is a unique conference format. There are no regular talks, but half-day workshops for 3 days. It felt like a Summer School where you learn things in a hands-on practical way. Besides learning a lot giving my own tutorial, i got a glimpse into the future with Nicolas Grekas showing how to upgrade to Symfony 3 and assisted Michele Orselli in his continuous integration workshop. The conference also featured a sports program on the 3 days with swimming, biking and finally running in the morning before the workshops started. And after the conference, we where invited to a boat trip to the beautiful city of PoreÄ.
Bulgaria PHP was held the first time. But it started with a bang! Sold out at 500 tickets and running very smoothly. I have been to many nice conferences and the organization was always good. But BGPHP really set a record in the quality of informing people what was going on. They had many great international speakers ā but I hope next year they find a few more local speakers too. Sebastian Bergmann did a good talk on getting ready for PHP 7. I also found the keynote Eating ElePHPants by Larry Garfield very interesting. He explained how they managed to refactor Drupal to the Object-Oriented application it will be in Drupal 8.
Speakers where not only invited to a speakers dinner, but also on a two-day trip through Bulgaria. This was a truly unique experience both to get to know the speakers that joined the tour and to see a bit more of Bulgaria, a country I have never visited before.
