CodeigniterCon 2010

I spent the weekend in Bristol so I could attend cicon2010 – a volunteer-organised first-edition conference around the CodeIgniter PHP Framework. It started on Saturday morning with registration at 8:30am and the first talk at 9am. When I arrived (at about ten to nine) there were no organisers there. I took this photo around 9:45 (the camera is on GMT) as they attempted to set up the projector.

DSCF2309.JPG

I saw two talks, both of which were actually really good, which is pretty impressive when you’re going on stage to a rather fed up audience! Kudos to Kevin Prince and Joel Gascoigne for their talks. By this time we did get an announcement about what times the other talks would happen and I snuck out for lunch and cups of tea.

When I popped back (I assume there was a long lunch as I didn’t get there until almost 4 and still caught the last two talks) I saw Adam Griffiths and Phil Sturgeon round off the day with their talks, and I must admit that I think the talk content was spot on, although the speakers were mostly pretty inexperienced, they all had some great thoughts to share and I did get some technical content from it (and a list of new friends, thanks Phil!)

I had been looking forward to the conference social but after hanging about in a strange city on my own waiting for a promised tweet of time and location, I bailed. The people I met at cicon were a nice crowd and I’m sure it would have been fun but I got some other stuff done instead which was also useful.

In summary: nice people, useful content. worst event I think I’ve ever been to (sorry guys).

I tweeted about my disappointment and got a couple of people asking me what my advice is for events organisers. I’ve now done a few technical events and will wrap up my advice into a post (now I’ve outlined it, probably more than one post!) so look out for that over the next few weeks.

(as a total aside but kind of for the record, for an event with 40 ish people, I was disappointed to be the only woman there)

4 thoughts on “CodeigniterCon 2010

  1. Com’on ;)
    I do agree with the technical parts but this event, if you are a little bit rocknroll in your life was awsome !

    Just for the people we met ! The CI community is there now ! And that’s the point.

    Next time, i’ll come with mu suit and tie. Will see if that’s the most important ;)

    Cheers,
    Alex.

  2. I fully agree that our organization, timekeeping and communication was piss-poor for the entire event and I am very grateful for the honest remarks (and compliments).

    That said I think most people had a bit of a laugh. A few attendees say they now feel part of the community and will start releasing more code soon, so that is a massive plus for the CI community in general as I know this code will be good.

    I have to admit, I am truly embarrassed about the failing of this “conference” but now I have a long list of things I’ll be doing differently and several people have come forward offering help for 2011. Next time this will be an amazing event, hopefully with even more of the CI community joining us. Most likely in London too.

    Sorry again Lorna!

  3. Shame you missed Elliot’s talk – he was refreshingly laid back but gave some great ideas about social network integration leading up to introducing his socialize library for 2.0.

    My head was spinning with ideas afterwards.

    I agree with most people, yes it was badly organised, yes it started late but you get what you put into it and it felt more like a pub get together user group than a conference so it was easier to talk to the speakers and other people in a natural way. Kudos to Phil for fostering that kind of atmosphere even if it was probably by accident.

    Kind regards, Spencer

  4. It was really poor.

    First 2 talks were nothing to do with CI. The 3rd talk was “I did no prop/have no slides”; when asked about “Fat model/thin controller”, the speaker advocated putting all business logic in the controller. That’s when I left.

Leave a Reply

Please use [code] and [/code] around any source code you wish to share.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.