I’m pleased to announce that if you’ll be at php|tek 2011 in Chicago this May*, you’ll be able to meet some of the team. Both Trevor Morse and I (Keith Casey) will be in attendance. We aren’t planning to run a “Birds of a Feather” session or an Unconference session or participating in the Hackathon but with a bit of persuasion and interest, I know that can change. 😉

Even more fun is that our own Benjamin Young is giving a half day tutorial on NoSQL titled “NoSQL: Why, How and When.” Here’s the synopsis:

SQL and Relational Databases have reigned supreme in the world of databases for decades. In recent years the field of data storage options has broadened to include key/value stores, graph databases, document databases, and more. In this tutorial we’ll dig into a range of scenarios where a non-relationaldatabase works well. We will take a close look at the document database,CouchDB, and look at how it uses map/reduce, JavaScript, replication, and HTTP/REST. CouchDB’s schema-less JSON storage will give us the flexibility we need for a metadata enhanced file storage app written in PHP. PHP will give us the data we need from the file, CouchDB will store it, serve the metadata and the file back, and let us replicate the whole shebang between our laptops–with or without conference provided Internet!

There are lots of other sessions ranging from Unit Testing to Node.js to PHP on Windows to Zend Framework to Design Patterns and dozens of other topics that are near and dear to PHP developers’ hearts. You can visit tek11.phparch.com for more details.

*  I’m one of the organizers of php|tek, Trevor and I originally met at php|tek 2009, and Benjamin is speaking.. so we’re all biased to one degree or another.