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The first day of Zend Con was pretty interesting. I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions, but the notable ones were Terry Chay’s The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture (hilarious guy), Ben Ramsey’s Give Your Site A Boost With memcache, and Eli White’s High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques (standing room only).

These types of sessions make conferences interesting and a learning experience (and ultimately worth spending your time at). Even though a lot of material might be common knowledge (covered in books, papers, online articles), it’s always important to get a sense of validation when you see their presentations with live data and hear comments from the audience about possible problems and gotchas.

Of course, no conference is complete without the odd product placement presentations (I’m looking at you IBM and Adobe) but as long as they keep their presentations geared towards providing solutions rather than forcing you to buy into their solution, I’m all for it.

If you’re at ZendCon 07, make sure to drop by the Yahoo! booth in the reception area where I’ll be handing out purple tote bags and chatting about the interesting things we do at Yahoo! (and Yahoo! Research in particular).