Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Kristi and I have just come back from the lovely town of Skien, Norway, attending the php|vikinger event organised by Zak Geant. It’s the first time I’ve attended an event like this, and I thought that Zak did a good job of running the unconference with the mighty power of Thor.

It was great to meet Sebastian for the first time, and to pick his brains about PHPUnit test suites. I confess I spent most of the weekend hacking away on my tests, rather than actively joining in the sessions; I now have unit tests for most of my Datastore PHP library. Need to track down and fix a PDO segfault, but otherwise it’s getting to the point where it’s actually useful. I hadn’t seen Hartmut’s PECL_Gen package before; I’m looking forward to when it can throw exceptions back into PHP (grin).

If you’ve never been to Norway before, it’s well worth the trip … especially if (like me) you’re used to how dirty and grey the UK can be. Don’t worry if you don’t know enough Norwegian. I think we met just the one person who didn’t speak English, and we’re pretty sure they were tourists too!