On October 7, 2013 Zend kicked off its annual developer Conference, ZendCon, also known as “PHP2013.” The event—which took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA—spanned 2 ½ days and included technical conference sessions, tutorials, several keynotes, a meet-the-team panel, PHP certification, a bustling exhibition hall, and countless networking opportunities. Sponsors included: OSSCube, Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform, among others. After revealing the main themes of this years’ event, things took an interesting turn. Joe Stagner, Director of Developer Strategy at Zend kicked things off with some confidence-boosting words, saying “It’s always been fun to be a PHP developer, but today with companies more and more adopting PHP…it’s even more exciting.” However, in addition to motivational speaking, Zend was able to combine a market analysis, a comprehensive study of developer interests, and a solution to common business woes (in the form of a product launch), into one cohesive presentation. The 1½ hour kickoff provided listeners with relevant data, and business solutions; we’re here to break it all down for you. 1. Zend has outlined four “key trends” for the community. · Mobile first · Iterative and rapid development · Development in concert with business · Building for third party consumption Why it’s important: Zend is constantly sending out surveys, conducting research, and monitoring trends in the developer and business communities. These trends aren’t lucky guesses, they are the result of thousands of respondents answering questions about the way they conduct themselves and their businesses on a daily basis. These key trends show what every developer needs to prepare to conquer. Any upcoming gig is going to require a solid knowledge base on each of these topics. Bonus points If you’re bringing something new to the table. 2. In 2013 91% (of 5,000 surveyed developers) are working on mobile applications. Why it’s important: In 2012 this number was 66%. Still think mobile is a fad? These are numbers you can’t ignore. In addition, Elaine Lennox, Chief Marketing Officer at Zend, estimates that 90% of those developing mobile apps are using APIs and cloud-based services. This means that not only are developers moving toward mobile, but they’re doing it in the cloud; are you keeping up? 3. 87% of developers experience delays in rolling code out to production. Elaine Lennox details a few reasons why: Inconsistent environments, No automation, Lack of collaboration with operations, No visibility to production. Why it’s important: These are clearly identified issues impacting the majority of business operations, and they’re probably affecting you. These are slowing you down and affecting your operations, product quality, reputation, and ultimately your bottom line. This means that you have a checklist to work on. Go through these sources of delay and fix them, your business will run smoother, and the work environment will benefit from the stress [of encountering these issues] being lifted. 4. “What we’ve been trying to focus on at Zend is moving from agile development to agile delivery.”- Andi Gutmans, Co-founder of Zend Why it’s important: Andi pointed out that “It’s not just about agile development; writing code and writing code fast doesn’t really help you get it to production faster and really get to a higher pace of innovation.” Touching upon the key ideas mentioned earlier, Andi is recognizing that we aren’t fast enough. This point would go on to spur the announcement of Apigility, Zend’s new API framework meant to speed up development processes and bring code to production significantly faster. So that’s it; those are our four biggest “aha” moments from the ZendCon 2013 Keynote speech. It’s going to be interesting to see the progress of PHP and Apigility, and how they will affect the rate of doing business in the technology sector. What we know for sure, is that mobile applications and time to production are revving up, and about to blast off. Is your business ready? Were you at ZendCon? Do you have an opinion on the Keynote? Leave us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you!Watch the full discussion here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJi6OSFb-g About OSSCube: OSSCube is the world’s only certified Zend Center of Excellence. Specializing in mission-critical business solutions, OSSCube prides itself on its expertise in the PHP, mobile, and contributing to the open source community among many other things. For more information please visit osscube.com.
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