Almost immediately after returning from my trip to Toronto, I headed to Brussels for EuroOSCON.

I missed EuroOSCON last year, because ZendCon was scheduled at the same time. This year produced a similar collision - the Microsoft Web Dev Technology Summit. (You can read Wez's summary for more information about that.) I was already scheduled to speak at EuroOSCON, so I had to decline.

As with most conferences, I had the pleasure of meeting a few new people and hanging out with old friends:

• James Duncan is the CIO of Fotango, a company that has just released a nifty JavaScript application development platform called Zimki. I haven't seen James in some time, so it was nice to see him and his wife Katrien.
• Bre Pettis is the author of I Make Things, a cool blog about innovation, invention, and DIY. He was demonstrating his drawbot, also known as the center of attention during the conference. (Katrien has a photo of its creations.)
• Paul Hudson is the author of the free online PHP book that O'Reilly later published as PHP in a Nutshell.
• Simon Willison maintains a popular blog that's mostly about PHP, Python, and JavaScript. He works at Yahoo and was instrumental in launching the Python Developer Center.
• Dale Dougherty founded O'Reilly with Tim and is the editor and publisher of Make Magazine. PHP people might remember Dale as the guy who was instrumental in helping to support the PHPCommunity.org project, which is now in the process of being migrated to Ning.
• Nat Torkington is the coauthor of the Perl Cookbook and the Program Chair for OSCON (and EuroOSCON and Where 2.0 and ETel).
• Zak Greant is the Director of North America at eZ and also works with the Mozilla Foundation. Both endeavors are through his consulting company, Foo Associates.

I presented my PHP Security Audit HOWTO talk, and perhaps as a result of my severe lack of sleep, I didn't feel like I was able to engage the audience as much as I wanted. However, all of the feedback after the talk was very positive, so maybe everyone was just quietly listening and taking notes. :-)

I enjoyed EuroOSCON and my visit to Brussels, but I might focus on conferences in North America next year in an attempt to further reduce the number of conferences I attend. There's always OSCON, my perennial favorite.