# Workshops, Meetups and Conferences, Oh My! So, you might have noticed that things have seemed to be a little too quiet around here lately. Between the typical summer slowdown, dev team members joining new startups, and more than a few speaking engagements, we have, needless to say, gotten off our tightly-regimented release schedule. Sorry y'all, my bad. We'll come back to that shortly, but in the meantime, the point is that we've still been churning away just as diligently as ever. In fact, at the time of this writing we're exactly 365 commits past our last release. By the time our _next_ release drops, that'll number will be closer to 400. That's more changes than our last 3 releases combined... by a lot. In addition to Lithium itself, we'll be releasing several plugins over the next few weeks, which will be covering... well, all kinds of stuff. I'll be talking a bit more about where we're at and where we're headed in an upcoming article on the state of the Lithium project, which will be published on [Zend's DevZone](http://devzone.zend.com/public/view) later this week. Aside from that, I wanted to do a quick roundup of some other things the team have been focusing on: events. Since this summer, we've been spreading the good news of Lithium (and MongoDB) all over the world. ### TEK·X [Joël](http://twitter.com/jperras) and I gave a joint presentation on why Lithium is the way it is, entitled **[Lithium: The Framework For People Who Hate Frameworks](http://www.slideshare.net/jperras/tekx-a-framework-for-people-who-hate-frameworks-lithium)**. Joël also gave a very informative developers' intro to graph theory, **[Graphs, Edges & Nodes - Untangling the Social Web](http://www.slideshare.net/jperras/graphs-edges-nodes-untangling-the-social-web)**, and I gave an updated version of my talk on **[Measuring Your Code](http://www.slideshare.net/nateabele/measuring-your-code-20)**. ### IPC I gave two very enjoyable talks at the spring edition of the International PHP Conference in Berlin: * **[Building Apps with MongoDB](http://www.slideshare.net/nateabele/building-apps-with-mongodb)** * **[Practical PHP 5.3](http://www.slideshare.net/nateabele/practical-php-53)** The audiences for both were very receptive and asked lots of good questions. ### MongoDB Meetup I also had the opportunity to speak at [the MongoDB meetup here in NYC](http://www.meetup.com/New-York-MongoDB-User-Group/calendar/13527621/), where I demonstrated how to use Lithium with MongoDB's GridFS technology to build a geo-tagged photo blog in just a few minutes. If you check out the event page, you can see links to some low-fi video of the tutorial, thanks to [Yusuke Ando](http://twitter.com/yando). In addition, [the (incomplete) source code for the photo blog project](http://dev.lithify.me/photoblog) is now available. ### PHP Matsuri [PHP Matsuri is the premiere PHP conference in Japan](http://2010.phpmatsuri.net/page/what-is-php-matsuri), and was a hugely successful event, thanks to the hard work of Yusuke Ando, [Yasushi Ichikawa](http://twitter.com/ichikaway), and everyone else on the conference staff. Joël and I were both invited to speak, as well as representatives from Symfony and CakePHP. In addition to an updated version of what has become our standard **[joint Lithium talk](http://www.slideshare.net/nateabele/lithium-the-framework-for-people-who-hate-frameworks-tokyo-edition)**. It was a great chance to connect with the talented, energetic and prolific Japanese developer community, and a lot of great things were accomplished at the 24-hour hackathon event, including the beginnings of translation support for [our documentation tool](http://dev.lithify.me/li3_docs). ## Upcoming events If you are or are going to be in the New York area, you still have a chance to get in on the action. We have several events coming up, with more in the works. ### Lithium: The Base Elements Next Tuesday (October 19th), the Lithium core team will be holding a [one-time workshop event demonstrating how we design applications](http://li3-nyc.eventbrite.com/). As you know, Lithium incorporates a lot of new programming paradigms, and if you're looking for how best to take advantage of these (and not shoot yourself in the foot with them), you won't want to miss this. The event will also feature architects of **[totsy.com](http://www.totsy.com/)**, a popular, high-traffic private sale site built completely on Lithium and MongoDB. They'll be on-hand to answer questions about their architecture, application design, and their experiences using these technologies to build a high-profile e-commerce app. Come meet the team and get your questions answered... and possibly witness some live software releases. We still have a few seats left: <div style="width:100%; text-align:left;" ><iframe src="http://www.eventbrite.com/tickets-external?eid=887449385&ref=etckt" frameborder="0" height="220" width="100%" vspace="0" hspace="0" marginheight="5" marginwidth="5" scrolling="auto" allowtransparency="true"></iframe> ### Long Island PHP Users Group Lithium is getting back-to-back representation at the Long Island PHP Users Group starting this month, when [Fitz Agard](http://twitter.com/FitzHAgard) demonstrates [RAD Development using Lithium, MongoDB and the 960 Fluid Grid Template](http://liphp.org/rad-development-using-lithium-php-framework-mongodb-and-960-fluid-grid-template-fitz-agard). Then, on November 29th, I'll be speaking on more things you can do with Lithium. Will we be 1.0 by then? I guess we'll see... ~ nate ~