FOWA London 2007 - spoilt for choice.

The workshop day.

Eight workshops running over the day, split into two sessions: 4 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon. You have to chose 2 that you'd like to attend (one from each session).

It's not fair :(.

Morning

What PHP developer wouldn't want to attend a workshop with Rasmus, the man who initiated PHP and the language's BDFL? I'd love to listen to his thoughts and pick his brains about a couple of performance issues i've seen come up on the PHP-Internals mailing list; also i'd like to probe him the future of PHP and it's place in the development scene.

I'm equally drawn to Matthew Ogle's workshop on scaleable LAMP environments: we all dream about writing code that requires a distributed approach with caching daemons and servers, right? I find this level of the LAMP architecture fascinating.

Then there's Jeremy Keith. I read his journal (and read his book): i love his approach to javascript (progressive enhancement aka Hijax) and his way of thinking generally. This would be more about the person than the content though, although the accessibility and javascript stuff would be interesting to hear.

Lastly, there's the design guy - the design director for NYTimes.com. The creative visual stuff is my weakest link: but this also means it's the area in which i have the most to gain. I'd love to improve my basic design skills, even if it was just the fundamentals that would allow me to evaluate design decisions more wisely.

Choices suck!

Afternoon

It's just more of the same: 4 sessions i'd love to attend.

Tara Hunt just totally intrigues me: I love reading her blog and her take on the web scene and i feel just being a part of the workshop would be a great experience - full of passion and user power!

The Amazon EC2 / S3 products have been on my radar for a while and learning more about them would be great - stuff like the nitty-gritty details of practically implementing them: like what scale you might start with, could a bootstrapped startup afford their service? How fast can you deploy; are there any companies providing server-admin services for EC2 rigs?

"Tips and tricks for Building Successful Web Apps" - yes please! This one looks like a lot of practical information about code environments and more "business-related" topics - something i think is important to learn about rather than being a programmer-geek with your head burried so far into code that you miss the big picture.

SEO Optimisation: one of the first things on a client's checklist and another area i'd like to brush up on. I'd like some more ammunition, rather than relying on a "make semantic and accessible markup... make a good product/service... generate content that people will link to".

Sigh. I want to go to them all.