SAMSA Staff Attends PHP-Tek Conference

SAMSA recently sent three of its staff members to the PHP-Tek Conference 2007 held May 15-18 in Chicago, Illinois.

SAMSA president Michael Stackhouse states, "Our goals in attending the PHP-Tek conference were to ensure SAMSA remains on the cutting-edge of development practices and to learn about emerging Internet development issues and practices. The SAMSA team that attended brought diverse perspectives to the conference including sales, design, project management, development, and testing."

Internet Department Manager, Hillary Norfleet, says, "I was excited by some new software tools which will help us work more efficiently. It was also very interesting to learn about the PHP Women's group."

In regards to attending the conference, SAMSA programmer Josh Taylor states, "I thought the most intriguing session was the one focused on PHP security. We were given a good overview of security issues and vulnerabilities that will overall help SAMSA continue to be on-top of developing secure applications for all of our clients."

Dedicated to continuously updating skills and taking advantage of the latest technology to bring to the table for clients, staff split up to attend as many sessions of interest as possible. The conference was informative, useful, and staff gained new perspectives for some of the projects they're currently working on.

Security related sessions featured discussions on attacks that web-based applications face, from viruses to hackers. The purposes of these discussions were to show attendees how to secure data the most effective way, keep users safe, and prevent future attacks. The sessions attended include:

-Dependency Injection in PHP
-Cryptography, Keeping a Secret
-PHP Security by Example
-The Truth About Sessions

SAMSA attendees learned about emerging and upgraded technologies and how to properly use and implement them in sessions like:

-Programming with Microsoft AJAX
-PHP and Ajax: Web 2.0 Beyond the Buzz
-Upgrading to PHP 5 with Style
-APC @ Facebook

Effective ways to increase the number of visitors to client websites, in depth information about accessibility, and other pertinent SEO information and techniques were presented in other lectures. Sessions that covered new ways to optimize performance include:

-PHP, Accessibility, and Search Engines: Enemies no longer!
-Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance
-Lock Your Database Application!

Amongst the informational sessions, SAMSA staff learned that the World Wide Web continues to evolve and the SAMSA team is committed and prepared to meet its clients' ever-changing business requirements, ranging from the most simplistic to most modern concepts, programming, coding, and data encryption methodologies.