Sebastian Bergmann

In times of tight budgets, quality is a key success factor to reduce risks in IT projects.

I have joined forces with Arne Blankerts and Stefan Priebsch and founded thePHP.cc, The PHP Consulting Company.

Together we help businesses and enterprises to reduce IT costs in the long term with Open Source technologies and PHP and MySQL in particular. We support our clients in improving their employee's qualification to overcome skills shortages.

The three of us have long-standing experience in consulting, coaching, and training and are sought-after speakers at international IT conferences. We previously have helped clients such as Cisco and Digg as well as government agencies.

The organizers of OSDC::Israel::2009 have asked me to help them find sponsors for their event.

The Open Source Developers' Conference in Israel, 2009 is planned to be a low-cost three-day muliple track conference held somewhere in Israel. The conference will be held in the beginning of 2009. Exact dates and location will be announced later on our mailing lists.

The conference theme is Open Source Tools with an emphasis on Test Automation and Quality Assurance. The talks presented at the conference will be about practical uses of Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby and some other languages and technologies.

I am particularly intrigued by the idea of the Israeli QA Hackathon to which I have been invited:

The purpose of the Israeli QA hackathon is to work on several Quality Assurance-related problems that are easier to solve when everyone is gathered in the same physical location. This can include issues with packaging, testing modules, community support but most notably the integration of the various tools.

To achieve this we will attempt to fund travel and lodging for a core group of QA people and try our best to make this workshop as fun, useful, relevant and productive as possible.

Please get in contact with Gabor Szabo if you would like to sponsor this event.

On June 21 2008 the third edition of PHP Vikinger will be held in Skien, Norway.

PHP Vikinger is an unconference directed towards everyone who wants to learn more about PHP and likes to discuss and meet with new people. Unlike normal conferences, the talks at an unconference are determined by the attendees, and not by a committee.

Just like in 2006 and 2007, this year's event will once again be organized by my friend Derick Rethans. Once again the attendance will be free: you just have to get to Skien and find a place to stay. Please do not forget to register.

The Power of Thor strong with this one is.

The previous PHP Vikinger events had a strong presence of PHP and MySQL contributers and I do not expect this to be different this year.

See you in Skien during Midsummer!

Once again I spent a week in the San Francisco Bay Area. This time around it was for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

I flew in on April 12 (from FRA via LAX to SJC) and arrived in the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in the afternoon.

The next morning I left the hotel around 7:00 in the morning for a genuine experience of what they call public transportation in the bay area. It took me three hours to travel the distance of about 40 miles from Santa Clara to downtown San Francisco:

• Santa Clara VTA Light Rail from Santa Clara to Mountain View
• Caltrain from Mountain View to Millbrae
• BART from Millbrae to Powell Street

The most frustrating part of this experience was the fact that you buy separate tickets for each leg of the trip as the trains are operated by different carriers and that there is no integrated timetable online.

At LugRadio Live USA 2008 I attended the following sessions:

• Christian Hammond on Review Board
• Allison Randal on Parrot
• Matthew Walster on the demoscene

I also got to talk briefly to Jono Bacon and Allison Randal before I had to start the three hour trip back to Santa Clara.

I got back to Santa Clara in time for the MySQL Community Dinner that was initated by Arjen Lentz.

Unlike with the PHP-focussed conferences that I usually present at, I managed to attend a session in almost every timeslot (each of which had 8 sessions to choose from) at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

• Monday
  • MySQL Proxy: The Complete Tutorial
• Tuesday
  • State of MySQL
  • Open Source: The Heart of the Network Economy
  • The Lost Art of the Self Join
  • InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features
  • Investigating InnoDB Scalability Limits
• Wednesday
  • Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
  • Scaling MySQL - Up or Out?
  • MySQL Sandbox
  • Falcon from the Beginning
  • Architecture of Maria
  • Extending MySQL
• Thursday
  • Who is the Dick on my site?
  • The Social Graph and the Database
  • Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth
  • Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks
  • Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP

I had a great time at the conference. I met a lot of nice people, had plenty of interesting discussions, and I learned a lot in the sessions.

Here is the presentation material I used for my "Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit" presentation at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA today.

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A PDF version of the presentation is available here, notes by Joe Stump (Digg.com) are here. Thanks to Sheeri Kritzer Cabral there is a video of the presentation.