Every year the folk at PHP|Architect put on a great conference PHP Tek.  This year Tex-X will be in Chicago and has a killer schedule lined up.  This year, myself and a handful of co-workers went to Code Works in San Francisco, which was also put on by the PHP|Architect folks.  TEK-X promises to build off the sessions we attend there and much more.

At CodeWorks I learned a couple of tricks that I have made a part of my skill set at work so I am excited to learn even more.  This is where conferences are invaluable.  Sometimes a conference will teach you some piece of game-changing technology, but it is often the little tricks that will save you a lot of time in your day to day job.  Conferences also are a great place to meet members of the PHP community and network.

There are great sessions scheduled and several I consider a "Must See".

Andei’s Regex Clinic

PHP Best Practices

Large Scale Systems

Subversion in a Distributed World

Code & Release Management

XDebug

The Art of Message Queues

Building Real-Time Applications with XMPP

You should definitely check out the schedule page to see all of the other great sessions, but those are the ones where you'll find me.