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Alright folks, here is my promised post about the festivities in Orlando.

Since I'm not much of a story teller I'll make this a picture post (my hosting company should really re-think that unlimited bandwidth package, haha).

Alright, the gentleman in this picture are Garrett (aka gwoo) and Mariano. Garrett is the project manager and has also been largely responsible for making this event happening, so big kudos to him! Mariano is just some weird guy from Argentina. He uses Windows. No seriously, it was tons of fun to get to meet him after having worked over 6 months on a project with him. He's also going to organize the next cakefest in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is a big contributor to the framework itself ; ).

This picture I believe was taken the night before CakeFest started. From left to right it shows: Larry (PhpNut), Jeff (phishy), Mariano, Felix (thats me, aka the_undefined), Tim (who works on PostTask.com with me) and Garrett (aka gwoo). We all had some good food and plenty of drinks. Tons of fun!

This was one of the two conference rooms we used. Up front is Garrett giving his keynote which I found was really powerful as it truly communicated how much he loves the framework. Incredible dedication is all I can say.

The sign for the Hotel "Imperial Swan" the conference was held at. "Full liquor bar", my kind of joint ; ).

Travis, Garrett and Chris Hartjes planning out a BeerTask for the bake shell or something. Travis is a really nice and smart guy, it was fun to meet him. Same goes for Chris who I had some fun German conversations with ; p.

From left to right: Jeff, who we all envy for chilling at St. John in the Caribbean (and who gave a talk on a really tight Versioning behavior he wrote), Nate Abele who I have to thank again for saving my second talk (I screwed up some core file and forgot about it), and Ryan Peterson who is probably one of the most energetic upbeat people I ever met. His talk on interface design was quite revealing and you should ask him about the kick-ass CMS he is working on.

I think this shot was taken from the ad-hoc jQuery workshop Marc and I did after the talks.

Some cute alligators we met while exploring the surroundings of the hotel.

So cute in fact that Mariano had to kiss one of them. The picture also shows lots of CakePHP folks. From left top to bottom right: Antonio (who's talk I unfortunately missed because I had one at the same time, he's a really smart and nice guy from italy), Jason (who I really enjoyed talking to as well), Larry (our Lead dev, who was unbelievable nice in person, in stark contrast to the enforcer image most of us have in mind), Chris, Travis, Peter (from Belgium, works with Antonio on their impressive TiramisuPHP CMS), Tim, Mariano, Me, Frederic (smart guy from France, was fun talking to you man), Jeff and Yann (who works with Frederic, really enjoyed hanging out with him as well, thanks for opening my eyes about SOAP).

Some more gators, big ones this time ; ).

Larry (PhpNut) giving his Keynote. He had a hard time because his presenter notes didn't show, but I actually got a lot out of his talk, especially regarding uuids, the new UTF8 support in 1.2 as well as stuff I didn't know about the internationalization system.

Marc and Timo. I already knew Marc from jQuery Boston last year, but it was tons of fun seeing him again. He's a brilliant JS developer and one of the most dedicated folks I've ever seen. However, he's also incredible in that he tells the people interviewing him at Google that he doesn't know what a closure is. (He uses tons of them in his jQuery plugins and just never knew what they are called ; ). Timo was also great to meet. He is a fellow German and yet another exceptional JS (and PHP) guy who's published a JS library named Jamal that is very interesting. I also learned a great deal from the conversations I had with him.

Here we did some sort of performance benchmark.

Everybody participated.

And as you can clearly see from this rendering, CakePHP and its users are so fast you can hardly get a clear capture.

Jason and Travis. My camera must have been on a bit of an acid trip or something ; ).

Mariano posing for the camera.

Sonic the irish baker investigating some american brewing product.

All the folks who were at the conference except a bunch of people who had to leave early.

Me, mariano and Tim. It looks like he is about to fall without us holding him up ; p.

Dennis who is the project manager of the project I worked on last year and me. He's a very smart and nice guy, was great to meet him in person after working together for so long.

And last but not least Larry again with his two German "bodyguards" ; ).

Yeah, so as you can see we had a ton of fun. Tim and I even launched ourselves 360 feet up in the air, as you can see in this video.

Before I end this post I just want to say thank you to all of the folks who came and especially those who have been involved with the logistics of all of this. It was a pleasure to meet everybody and I'm looking forward to the next CakeFest in Argentina.

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: The keynote file for my slides can already be downloaded, but stay tuned for another post on it. Oh and please correct me if I misspelled any names, or if you'd like your name to be linked in the post.