I had the privileged recently of spending a few minutes on the phone withJason Austin, one of the speakers for TEK·X. I had hoped to be able to let you listen to the conversation but as sometimes happens, the technology did not cooperate. So instead I’ll give you the transcript here for you to enjoy

TEK·X is happy to announce that Nate Abele will be presenting his session, “Measuring Your Code” as part of TEK·X.

One of the biggest problems of software projects is that, while the practice of software development is commonly thought of as engineering, it is inherently a creative discipline; hence, many things about it are hard to measure. While simple yardsticks like test coverage and cyclomatic complexity are important for code quality, what other metrics can we apply to answer questions about our code? What coding conventions or development practices can we implement to make our code easier to measure? We’ll take a tour through some processes and tools you can implement to begin improving code quality in your team or organization, and see what a difference it makes to long-term project maintainability. More importantly, we’ll look at how we can move beyond today’s tools to answer higher-level questions of code quality. Can ‘good code’ be quantified?

This will be a great session and will make the decision of which session to attend during that time slot all the more difficult.

If you have not yet registered for TEK·X, make sure you do so soon! Click here to sign up and insure your seat at this great conference.

TEK·X Attendees and those still on the fence, I am very excited to announce that Kristina Chodorow will be joining our already great lineup of speakers. If you were at her webcast a few weeks ago or if you are in the MongoDB community already, you know Kristina is one of the lead programmers on MongoDB.

Kristina will be teaching a tutorial titled “Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB” and a regular session titled “MongoDB for Mobile Applications”

If you are looking to learn more about MongoDB or NoSQL in general, these are sessions you don’t want to miss.

There are still tickets for both the Tutorial Day and the Conference. Com learn and laugh with us at TEK·X, Register today.

Hey! Are you registered to attend TEK·X? If so, show the world that you are attending the PHP community’s best conference.

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and you get a pretty badge on your blog that looks like this.

Let everyone know you are attending TEK·X so they can find you and make plans to get together.

Last year php|architect and Microsoft got together and hosted a series of webcasts on topics of interest to PHP developers. We had so much fun that we are going to do it again this year. As most of you know, we had so many great proposals submitted to TEK·X that there was no way we could schedule them all. This year, instead of saying “Sorry, better luck next year” to these presenters, we selected the best of the ones that we couldn’t find room for and invited them to be a part of the webcast series.

The complete webcast schedule can be found at the TEK·X Webcast page.

Register today, join us Fridays leading up to TEK·X. Make it a habit to learn something new.

It’s still not too late to save $100 off the price of a full TEK·X ticket.

TEK·X ticket sales are coming along nicely and we fully expect a sold out conference by May. However, because we know the downturn in the economy has hurt everyone, we are extending our Early Bird special ticket price.

We’re proud, excited and not a little bleary-eyed to announce that the initial schedule for TEK·X is finally live.

Our 42 scheduled talks (and two keynotes!) feature some of the best-known speakers in the PHP community, as well as a number of newcomers who caught the attention of the selection committee with ideas that are both novel and exciting.

Compiling the schedule was no small task. With almost ten proposals for every slot (even after we obliterated the Uncon—and replaced it with the Hack Track—to gain an additional seven speaking slots), it took the efforts of everyone on the selection team through the holidays to finally nail down a final lineup. On behalf of everyone here at TEK·X headquarters, I’d like to thank everyone who submitted a proposal (or, in one case, seven); we look forward to seeing many—or all—of you in Chicago.

Oh, one final thing: now that the schedule is live, you can still get a great price on your ticket with our early-bird discount. Quick, though—it ends on January 31st!

Each year, we try to do something unique at tek. Two years ago, we had an appearance from the  PHP KISS rockstars. Last year, we had the Hackathon led by the highly esteemed Matthew Turland. This year, we’re still going to have a Hackathon, but wanted to do something more.

On top of that, we faced some hard decisions. When the call for speakers ended, we had nearly 10 submissions for every speaking slot and some of them were fantastic. So after much deliberation and debate, we reached a simple conclusion:

We’re dropping the Unconference this year. (gasp)

I know you’re disappointed but in exchange we were able to add 6 more sessions to the 36 we had.  Now we only had ~9 submissions for every speaking slot!  Whew, problem solved. Anyway, let’s face it, after successful uncons at ZendCon 08, tek 09, and ZendCon 09, we all know how they work and what makes them not work. The same formula over and over again doesn’t drive the community forward. It doesn’t make people get creative or get them excited. So after a bit of eggnog, arguing with Marco & Cal, bribing Arbi with cookies, and another round of eggnog, we came up with another idea:

Enter… the Hack Track.

Every year big ideas come out of tek. Some are good, some are bad, but they always come from running into new and old faces in the hallways, at a meal, or over drinks. The problem is that there’s not a good place for this stuff to happen. The hallways lack outlets, the tables are in the restaurant, and people’s rooms are… well, they’re hotel rooms.

This time around, we’ve set aside some space with tables, chairs, power, and coffee… but no formal agenda. We’re using the Open Spaces model where small groups can get together to discuss, create, demo, code, and generally enjoy themselves on whatever topics they choose.

Just like the Unconference before it, we’ll make sure some smart people are lurking in the corners. If you’d like to talk about that code from that session, ask the speaker to show you. If you want to know about that project someone mentioned, ask about it. I plan to be there working on our AIR client for web2project. There’s already some interest around the Zend Framework and Subversion and Javascript libraries and Git and PHPUnit and Refactoring and…

Long live the Hack Track.

The gift giving seasons is upon us. In the mad rush to get everyone that special gadget they want, don’t forget to get yourself a little something.

This year, TEK·X is going to offer up a chance for some Christmas cheer. We are offering a limited number of Charter Tickets for sale before the schedule goes up. If you hurry, for the next two weeks you can purchase one of 50 full-experience tickets available at 35% off the full price.

This is a chance for our closest supporters to get in one of the best conferences of 2010—some say the best—at the lowest possible price, and it’s only available until January 6th, 2010. If you already making plans to attend TEK·X, why not buy yourself a Christmas present this year?

To take advantage of this special offer!

Hurry, there are only 50 tickets available at this price and once they are gone, even Santa himself won’t be able to get one.

Happy Holidays from the entire php|architect crew!

Tek is the biggest community conference out there. You’ve been looking forward to it all year. You’re chomping at the bit. It’s what you’ve all been waiting for.

But we’re not there yet…

We received almost 350 submissions from across the spectrum of topics, ideas, and complexity. The ideas are fascinating. The people are sharp. Their takes on topics—both new and old—has been creative and sometimes entertaining. While all of this makes for a great conference, it also makes our job incredibly difficult. The tutorials and sessions will be announced on January 4th, 2010.

But in the meantime, we’ll have surprise announcements about…

Well, if I told you, they wouldn’t be surprises, now would they?