Awaking at 3:30am, arriving in London at 8am and parking in a car park that would by the end of the day cost £41.50 (argh!), we went to the 2008 London php conference.

I found the venue to be better than previous years, and there seemed to be more people in attendance. Goody-bag wise, I snaffled a jar of PHP rock and super strong mints (thanks iBuildings) and a few random bits of paper. "Kat" also had a phpwomen t-shirt, which happens to be purple (the best colour). Paul spent most of his time trying to job hunt while the rest of us attempted to mingle and suchlike.

Talk wise - my favourite was the first, given by Ivo Jansch (Enterprise PHP), closely followed by Derick Rethans's keynote. In terms of content, the 'Beyond Mail()' was of most interest to me (thanks Marcus) but this is probably because it ties (slightly) together two business-related interests (email and php). Unfortunately I didn't really come away thinking I'd learnt anything new while being there - but it did help to refocus us testing, although this remains a problem which seems hard to solve.

Finally, PHPWM had an informal meetup, and discussion over whether/what we should/could do conference/event wise within our region. At the moment the most favoured idea seems to be some sort of hands on event, probably limited to 50-100 delegates - but we clearly have a lot more discussion to do yet before anything can happen.

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