This past weekend I attended Northeast PHP for the first time. I was lucky enough to have two talks selected (Unit Testing Done Right and Professional-grade Software Design) and they were both well-received. The audience was very complimentary and I got a few good pieces of feedback to improve my talks later.

The conference was held in Boston (next year in PEI) near MIT and hosted in the Microsoft New England Research Division (NERD) Center. The night before the conference we were treated to a speaker's dinner at Cafe ArtScience, where they demonstrated Le Whaf, a device invented by one of the chefs there to aerosolize liquids (distilled spirits in this case) using ultrasonics and cavitation instead of heat. This let us experience all the aromatic flavors of a tequila without the ethanol burn. That was a really cool experience and I'd love to try it again with other liquids. Here's an article about it if you'd like to read more.

I also got to record an episode of Voices of the Elephpant with Cal Evans, which was a fun experience. I'd recommend taking it him up on the opportunity if you get it. It should be up sometime in the next two months Edit: It's here.

The conference itself was fun. I'm rarely in the northeast so I got to meet a number of new speakers and attendees. There was a big focus on testing and microservice architecture in the various tracks, which was great to see. Everyone was friendly and helpful. All in all it was a good experience and if you're in the area I'd check it out next year.