Ah what sweet nerdy bliss. My first PHPcon was quite an experience. It’s quite a moment in your life when you meet many major players in your industry and see the faces behind what you’ve been plugging away at for 10 years. Feeling a sense of place in the community really changes your outlook on what you do for a living – I realized the reason I code is not just to get the work, but it’s the ideas that come out of it that make it the most fun.

I got so much inspiration from the presenters and other attendees at the conference; getting back to basics and realizing that you need to be the driving force behind ideas is what it’s all about. Don’t wait for the requirements of your projects to innovate, you’ll never get what you want out of that, unless you get lucky with a few here and there. What I really learned was that the fun lies in the exploration of new concepts and teqhniques, not in the “this doesn’t fit my current project, so I wont look at it” attitude. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve skipped over something just because I didn’t think I could use it right then and there. Keeping the big picture in mind – innovation, integration, and imagination – is key for me.

Here’s a link to the talks that were there. You can follow the links to get back to phparchitect, and all the awesome presenters that were there! If you’re a coder, you have to go to this thing next year, it was quite alot of fun!
http://cw.mtacon.com/schedule/city/new-york