Andrei Zmievski

Becoming an American citizen a couple of years ago greatly eased travel-related headaches for me – no more visas to worry about (in general), way faster processing at the passport control, and so forth. Because of this, I was finally able to make it to PHP UK conference this year, and I have to say that I enjoyed it very much. The organizers did a great job with the venue, the social events, food, drinks, making sure things ran on time and a host of other things that I’m sure I didn’t even notice. A really nice touch was the badges that had the name and the sessions schedule printed on both sides. It was also great to meet a bunch of new people, including some that I only knew from the mailing lists or Twitter. This was probably one of the best community-organized conferences that I’ve been to.
I gave a talk on ElasticSearch, which is part of the technology stack behind Mapalong. This was the first incarnation of the talk, but I thought it went fairly well, though I did run overtime slightly and couldn’t do all the demos that I wanted to. The slides are available on the Talks page.