Cakefest 2009 was held from 9th-12th July 2009 in Berlin. Luckily I was able to attend the two day conference part of it on Saturday and Sunday. The crowd was really international. People from all over the world gathered – even folks from Australia and Japan joined the event. The bakers were overall very friendly and helpful – the talks really great! Given to the fact that the network was shaky from time to time which doesn’t help if you are showing a way of deploying live into an amazon cloud there were no deficiencies.

Attending the Cakefest raised – among other things – the awareness of the importance of giving things back to the community. Further the importance of various development aspects were raised. Among them:

• Git is THE THING if you want proper version control – forget about SVN
• Think before you implement (this one should be obvious) – how you implement thing in the CakePHP way. Chose carefully which path you take: Component, Helper, Datasource…
• Datasources in general are entities where CRUD statements can be carried out. (Twitter is a datasource by this defintion)
• Implement and use testing as standard practice (implement your Tests directly after implementing any functionality)
• Continuous integration is a great thing (Tools: Phing, Xinc)
• Check out the CakePHP Media Plugin (this will resolve a lot of problems handling file- and mediauploads) and give feedback to David via GitHub
• Internationalisation is convenient with CakePHP – get sample code and slides here

Thanks for the great organisation of the event, I imagine this was no easy task to accomplish!  I am looking forward meeting you all at the next Cakefest in 2010!

Further Coverage of Cakefest 2009

• Talk wrapup articles from Graham Weldon on CakeDC.com
  Garret Woodworth – CakePHP then, now and tomorrow (Opening keynote)
  Joël Perras – Demystifying Webservices in CakePHP
  Felix Geisendörfer – Recipies for successful CakePHP projects
  Neil Crookes – Bake Master Class
• Materials (Code Samples and Slides) on CakePHP.org
  Alexander Morland – Test and API driven development of CakePHP Behaviors
  Charlie van de Kerkhof – Building Custom APIs
  Felix Geisendorfer – Recipies for successful CakePHP projects
  Mariano Iglesias – Internationalizing CakePHP Applications
  David Persson – The CakePHP Media Plugin
  Neil Crookes – Bake Master Class
  Topic_Mind_Map

To keep updated on new materials and further news on Cakefest 2009 I would recommend taking a look on Twitter, as news will be posted there first hand.