It's the day after MadisonPHP 2014, and I'm sitting in my hotel room waiting to leave, so this is the perfect time to get my thoughts down for this wonderful one day conference in Madison, WI.
The MadisonPHP Conference is a conference put on by the MadisonPHP User Group, and it one of the many small regional conferences that has popped up in the last couple of years. 2014 was the second year of the conference, but my first time attending since I had a scheduling conflict last year. This year they brought together not only local speakers, but speakers from around the US. And for some reason me.
As with most of the regional conferences I've been to over the last few years, the concentrated time and focus of the conferences makes for a well packed scheduled. There was a wide variety of talks not only on PHP but more general topics like APIs, AWS, a smattering of computer science, functional programming, and others, which were spread out into three tracks - PHP Foundations, Professional 1, and Professional 2. Beth, Andrew, and Ryan selected a great group of talks for the attendees to enjoy.
The venue was perfect for the size of the conference. I had a pretty good turnout for my talk, and the sessions I went to were well attended. The lunch and dinner snacks were excellent, and there were plenty of drinks between sessions. We also had cupcakes sponsored by Rackspace that were delicious. The attendees were also very active on Joind.in, so it is great as a speaker to get almost instant feedback. Overall I can't think of anything bad about the venue for MadisonPHP.
I had a great time, even if travel for me was a bit long (not in any way shape or form MadisonPHP's fault - apparently Ohio doesn't like to let people travel to Wisconsin easily). Beth was a wonderful host shuttling us around town and putting up with us, and I assume Ryan and Andrew were as well. I am definately planning on attending next year, schedule permitting.
Overall, if you are in the Madison Wisconsin area, check out the MadisonPHP conference, and if you live close enough check out their user group. There are some great people here that really care about developers and PHP.