It's about that time of year again!

As of 8pm EST this evening, the BarCampDC2 registration is open!

At the time of this writing (09:21pm EST on 22 September), there are less than 150 tickets gone... and they're going to disappear in no time.  If you're interested, you need to move quickly to register and get your tickets.  Sponsors are guaranteed a ticket to get in and with $1000 still required for the effort (maximum sponsorship $250) and the solution is obvious.

No.. quicker than that.

Well, it's about that time of the year... the fall conference season is underway.  We have ZendCon/ZendUnCon (more about that on Monday), but for DC Locals, we have something even more fun:

BarCampDC2

BarCampDC is the event that brought much of the DC Tech Scene together last year.  All the pieces and people were around but we weren't connected... this brought many of them - or people from the various groups - together in one place.  It led to a number of major projects kicking off, some ideas dying and even bigger things being dreamt of.

So here's the only problem.  We're still trying to settle on a date, but we have it narrowed down to three:  27 September, 04 October, or 18 October... and the final date will depend wholly on the venue.

In the next couple months, the conference schedule gets tight once again, but it's going to be so good. So, so good. At the time of this writing (27 Sept), the registration for all three events is still open.

First on the agenda is ZendCon 2007 (08 - 11 Oct) hosted in Burlingame, CA, just a few miles from the San Francisco Airport (SFO). I'm giving the first of my new presentations entitled "The Bionic App". Here's the summary:

We can rebuild it, we have the technology. Usually when we think of rebuilding an application, the first step is to start from a clean slate... losing the lessons we've learned before. Fortunately, we have an alternative. By using tools like the ZendFramework, Smarty, and your favorite Ajax library, you can bring even the most boring application up to date and implement completely new functionality quickly with minimal disruption.

The real core of this presentation came about through my work on both dotProject and the mobile platform that I built for FoxNews Mobile over the past year or so. I found myself surrounded by a sea of legacy code that needed cleanup and modification to move to a new level of usefulness. This presentation looks at some of the strategies I used and continue to use in these efforts.