PHP Everywhere on December 1, 2007

The PHP Users Group of the Philippines (PHPUGPH) is holding their first ever conference on December 1, 2007 at the Crown Regency Hotel in Manila. The event will start at 9 in the morning and will last till 6 in the evening.

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TechTalk with Google Engineers (from Mountain View, California)

These 2 Google engineers (photos below) were here in the Philippines last night to educate Pinoy developers about iGoogle or Google Gadget and Google Open Social.  They are Jay Aguilar and Franklin Naval. Both are Filipino.  I was expecting foreigners.

Our team, headed by our CEO, has prepared some questions about Open Social but unfortunately, none of these 2 engineers could answer the questions directly.  They mentioned about Androids but when my boss asked about it, Jay just said that they couldn't give specific information as it was being handled by a different group and that they don't want to have different statements. Franklin, on the other hand, told us to visit the documentation on the website and post our questions on the Google group.  According to our Javascript Guru (Brian), we were like using Google search because these 2 kept on telling us to read the online documentation.  Acccording to Sherwin, our dev head, it's like saying "read the f***ing manual" in a nice way.

I think people were disappointed that they can't ask more technical questions. I heard only a couple of people asking and a testimonial from one of the students of Summer of Code.

Speaking of Summer of Code.  This one is interesting.   It's a project which started in 2005 with 49 countries, 40 organizations and 400 students.  It's basically an open source environment where experienced developers are being paired with students and they work on a specific project.  Some of the open source projects include Joomla, Drupal and Apache.  One of the students is now hired by Google as a consultant.

Going back to these 2 engineers.  It's good that they went all the way from Mountain View, California and gave us a talk like this.  But it could be better if they could answer more in-depth technical questions.