Hamburg-Altona MySQL-PHP User Group Meeting

Georg, Sandro and I followed one handwritten sign that pointed to another til we soon found ourselves in a cozy little bar hidden away at the back of an industrial space. In the corners and near the bar, a few groups of people chatted easily.

A projector waited on one of the tables, perched atop a couple empty plastic beer crates. The PowerBook connected without fuss - though I have yet to be able to coax 1024 x 768 out of the damn thing when connected to a projector.

After a quick restart of X, all was ready to go. We waited for the room to fill in a bit. The screensaver rotated pictures from our vacation at the Hallig and we joked about the various photos. It was quite pleasant - especially since friend, colleague and MySQL buildmeister Lenz Grimmer took some time from his move to come and visit.

By the time that Ulf arrived, there were about 25 people in the room and Georg and I started the presentation. We were slated to talk about MySQL 4.1, PHP 5 and ext/mysqli but Georg had inserted a false start at the beginning of the talk - a slide with the title, "PHP and MySQL for Dummies". After asking a few silly questions - "So, how many of you here already program? Do any of you use PHP?", we launched into the real session.

The talk went well - there was a nice community feeling and good interaction from everyone present. Funnily enough, I stumbled a bit over my own slides on prepared statements. I should just trash the verbiage - I can explain it much more crispy with the slides of sample code that follow.

Georg and I alternated speaking. Georg kept introducing the occasional awkward pause into his bits - afterwards he told me that he kept having ideas about how to implement certain chunks of functionality during the talk. :) During one of the longer side discussions, Lenz told me that we finally have http://snaps.mysql.com/snapshots.php! :)

Afterwards, there was a good deal of discussion. Georg, Sandro and I ended up discussing various issues with small groups of developers til the groups dwindled to a person or two. Lenz wanted to return home to work on more builds for MySQL 4.1. I ended up chatting with a pleasant man named Robert who has an interesting new business doing what he describes as lifestyle management.

Thanks to Ulf and the other organizers for organizing the event, to the attendees for coming out, to Robert and Stefan for good discussions, Georg for organizing the trip and co-presenting and Sandro for trekking out to support us, . The slides from the presentation are available in the presentations archive.