The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup

MacSpecialist, the friendly neighborhood independent Mac retailer & repair shop is holding their annual Reboot : A Consumer Electronics Recycling Event on May 22nd, 2010 from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

As tech professionals and enthusiasts, I’m sure we all have drawers and closets full of broken or outdated equipment. Here’s a chance to dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way. Plus, anyone who drops items off will get a scratch card for prizes or $10-$1000 off merchandise.

They’re located at 234 West Roosevelt Road in the Villa Oaks Shopping Center in Villa Park, Illinois (by Burlington Coat Factory and the Chuck E Cheeze).

After such a positive response from April’s meetup, the Fox Valley Computing Professionals is hosting an encore night of “Social Networking For Business” on May 11th at 6:30pm. We have a new location at 2000 South Batavia Rd, Geneva IL., and we don’t have to worry about librarians kicking us out at 9pm sharp anymore!

I’ll be presenting my “Facebook for Business” presentation again this month, and hopefully we’ll have more time for questions this time.

Hey, Chicago area PHP geeks! The annual php|tek conference is happening May 19-22, 2009 right in our own back yard, at the Sheraton Gateway Suite O’Hare.

Early bird pricing technically ended last night (I got in just under the wire), but their system is still charging the early bird rate, so you might still be able to get that discount. But, wait, it gets better! Members of our meetup can save an additional $100 on registration; put in “The West Suburban Chicago PHP Meetup” as your company, and click the button for the discounted rate for PHP/MySQL/Linux user group members.

All registration packages include a complimentary 1 year subscription (Print & PDF) to php|architect magazine, a $29.99 value.

Sessions on this year’s schedule that caught my eye include:

• AJAX Testing: Tools and Techniques
• Of Haystacks and Needles (integrating search into your site)
• Untestable Code
• ORM in the PHP World
• PHP 5.3 – Hot or Not?
• Design Patterns in PHP
• Seven Steps to Better OOP Code
• Everything You Need to Know About mod_rewrite
• Coping With Cyber Monday (scaling)

I hope to see you there!