Author Archives: lornajane

29 Sep
2009

PHPNW09: Weekend of PHP and Fun

Having just put the finishing touches to the schedule for PHPNW09, I’m realising just how excited I am about this event coming up in less than a fortnight. This is the second year we’ve run the event, and its bigger and better than last year – and I know what a great crowd to expect! We kick off in Manchester on Friday 9th October for a pre-conference social, with the main event on Saturday and follow this, naturally, with another party! Since so many people are there for the weekend we’ve also taken some conference space for Sunday morning and begged a few more speakers to hang around and share their knowledge with those people who are staying for the weekend. (The Sunday speakers get no speaker package and they were all very gracious about having their arms twisted … we can’t thank them enough!)

The full schedule is now published with both Saturday and Sunday sessions now published along with timings for each. Although this is a local conference with a budget ticket price and organised by volunteers, the lineup would not look out of place at any other event on the PHP calendar – and we’d like to thank all the speakers that submitted talks to us, regardless of whether we managed to find time in the schedule for them. The submitters, the speakers, the helpers and the attendees are what makes this conference what it is – and I can’t wait! See you in Manchester :)

28 Sep
2009

Working at The Hub, Bristol

A couple of weeks ago I had some friends coming to the UK for a little while, but they were staying in Bristol and I live in Leeds. My weekends were pretty full so I wasn’t sure if I would get to see them – but since I telecommute I can work from anywhere with a decent connection and some quiet space. A friend recommended The Hub in Bristol, so I worked from there for the day.

Its a great place, I haven’t been to Bristol before and the views are rather good since the space is on the top floor. There was plenty of desk space and both wired and wireless connections available and they also have meeting rooms which were getting some good use the day I was there. The atmosphere was friendly and everyone had a smile for me, even though I was a stranger and only there for the day. The office is part-shared by sustrans so there were other nice ethical touches, like fairtrade tea and coffee and a good selection of recycling options.

I had a great day and will be looking out for opportunities to use The Hub again – either in Bristol or elsewhere. Thanks!

25 Sep
2009

Speaking at PHP Barcelona

I’m delighted to announce I’ll be speaking at the PHP Barcelona Conference in October. This is a new speaking topic for me, although I’ve been working and blogging in this area for a while, with a talk entitled “Working with Web Services”. Its a very technical session looking at different types of services and the tools available for working with them. We’ll also delve into overviews of how these services actually work and how we can troubleshoot when things go wrong. I’m really excited about writing and delivering this talk topic, and equally excited about my first trip to Barcelona and meeting lots of new people in the PHP community in Spain. If you are going – hope to see you there, come and say hi :)
22 Sep
2009

Lame Excuses for Avoiding Conferences

At the moment I am getting to quite a few conferences, as a speaker, as an organiser, and sometimes as a plain old attendee. I get so much from these opportunities to learn from experts in their various fields, meet people in the flesh whose blogs I read or whom I know from IRC. I also hugely value the opportunity to socialse and build personal connections, and to be a bystander for technical conversations between leaders where I understand most of the words but can barely follow the flow. I can quite appreciate that different people come to conferences for different reasons, but I cannot accept that people actively avoid conferences because they think its not for them – and the reasons for this, from people who have never been to a conference, are wild and varied. Most are based on misconceptions and I’d like to take the time to examine some of these.

I won’t know anyone

This situation will persist until you go to a conference and meet some people! Then, you’ll know some people at the next event. When I went to IPC in Frankfurt in 2007, I knew nobody but while I was there I met Derick, Sebastian and Zoe … and these three are now conference friends wherever I go! Lots of people at conferences are there on their own and will be happy to chat to you and find out who you are.

Its too expensive

While I’m lucky enough to have the support of my employers, Ibuildings, to send me to at least a couple of conferences per year, I’ve worked for plenty of other organisations that didn’t invest in their people. I think this is unforgivable but the reality is there are plenty of us in this situation. If you are paying your own way to these events I can appreciate that $1100 (~700 GBP) plus international flights plus a week in a hotel in Silicon Valley can seem pretty expensive if you want to get to ZendCon. But there are cheaper and closer conferences are available for most of us – so do your homework and get to something you can afford, even if you don’t do it every year. I’ve yet to get to a conference where the cost outweighed the benefit so in my view this excuse is invalid.

My employer won’t pay

No, well, see previous point. This is true for plenty of people and while I don’t have any numbers on people paying their own way – they do exist and they almost invariably move on to work for employers that do invest in their future. Do this for you, not for them.

I might have to talk to people/strangers

This is the excuse I hear the most often, or a variation on this. Actually you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. I went to an event last year and introduced myself to a guy who said “Hi, I’m James. I don’t have any social skills” and proceeded to say nothing further (his name may or may not have been James, I can’t really remember). To be honest I didn’t really think anything of it. Conferences are firstly about the technical content so if you want to come and get the technical sessions and then disappear again – that is your call. I can’t agree this is a good idea but there is absolutely no pressure to be the life and soul of the party, and in fact if you want to sit in the corner and mutter to yourself that is also fine … we’re all geeks after all! Nobody will judge you, in fact if you don’t talk to anyone probably nobody will notice you – just COME and you might be surprised :)

I haven’t been to a conference

Why not? Pick an event you like the sound of, join in the preconference hype (more about this in my post about making friends at a conference) and see how it goes. If you hate it, then don’t go to another. But don’t stay home immobilised by lack of experience, you’re missing out :)

Avoiding Conferences

Getting to a conference costs time, money and effort and if you don’t want to invest any of those things in your professional development then I respect your decision. However if you think you’d like to attend something, but you don’t know what to expect or you have concerns about what is expected of you, then try to put those fears aside and dive in! I think I’ve covered the things I hear most often – what excuses do you hear from conference-avoiders?

21 Sep
2009

Dedicated Talks Page

With increasing numbers of speaking engagements, I’ve decided that its time to add a dedicated page to this site just to list talks I’ve given and wil be giving, and link through to slides, blog posts, and perhaps some photos of me speaking (not sure about that last one). So if you’re looking for material from a talk I’ve given – take a look at the talks page, you can find everything there.

I’ve added all the past talks of note (made much easier by my tendency to blog and tag all these experiences!), let me know if you have any questions or comments!

13 Sep
2009

New Netball Rules

I somehow missed the news about the World Netball Series event. which brings together some of the top teams into a new form of competition with new rules. The event is in Manchester, 9th til 11th October, 2009 and it looks really good! I’m sort of busy that weekend, but busy in Manchester so hopefully I’ll get across to get a sneak preview of this new format of competition.

The new rules look AMAZING … things you don’t imagine we’d ever manage to introduce in mainstream competition. There’s quite a few but for me the big ones are:

  • Goals scored from outside the shooting circle not only count, but count as double points
  • The coaches can coach while the game is in progress (banned at many levels of competition
  • Centre passes are taken by the team that just conceded a goal
  • Substitutions can be made while the game is ongoing (how is this going to work? I can’t imagine!)

Looking forward to seeing how these rules play out and perhaps having them introduced in the leagues I play in eventually!

04 Sep
2009

Speaking at PHPNW09

I have experience of PHP conferences from all possible angles – as an attendee, as a speaker and as an organiser. At PHP North West this year I will be taking this to new heights and combining all three roles into a single one-day conference. I have a speaking slot at the event entitled “Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World”, which I’m very excited about. Its a talk that I think brings together the best ideas from a general software engineering world and puts them into the context of PHP development. If you’re wondering what the Joel Test is, then you can read about it on wikipedia.

Having spoken at a few different events now, some local and some quite high-profile PHP conferences (OK, so php|tek – the event of the year!), I’m really delighted to be bringing my ideas to the local conference that I help to organise and attached to a user group full of bright and interesting people. The experience of launching a call for papers, submitting my own abstracts, and then trying to figure out where it fits in when evaluating the CfP was a bit split-personality but with Jeremy’s input we decided this was a good fit – and I’m looking forward to delivering it!

The event itself is in Manchester, UK on Saturday 10th October and there is only one week remaining on the early bird ticket price!! So all those people who think its ages away and you’ll sort out arrangements nearer the time – you have been warned. The schedule is world-class (quite literally, these speakers do speak right around the world), and the price is pocket money (50 GBP + VAT until 11th September). As well as the technical content you get a fun weekend in Manchester, plenty of social activity, there’s more geekery happening the following day and all attendees get a 12-month subscription to php|architect magazine to keep them learning all year long. Now you’re persuaded – you can buy you tickets here and let me know to expect you!

PHPNW is the highlight of my year – I hope to see you there :)

28 Aug
2009

PHPNW: Schedule and Crowd-Sourcing

Plans for the second annual PHP North West conference (Manchester, 10th October) are coming along rather nicely, so I thought I’d share an update and some headline news. First of all – tickets cost 50 GBP + VAT. This is about 57 euros or 81 dollars. I don’t know where else you can buy conference attendance for that kind of money, we even have concessionary prices for students, OAPs, anyone else who can persuade us they deserve it. So – buy your tickets and come join in the fun!

Since I last posted here we also published the schedule. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the call for papers and there are some cracking sessions, excellent speakers, and lots of overlap between the two! Already grumbling can be heard about good sessions which clash with one another … which is rather a wonderful problem to have :)

Finally, this year PHPNW is expanding and has added an informal schedule on the Sunday morning since we know lots of people will be staying over. This will run from 9 til 1 and we’ve put out a call to ask what people would like to see on the schedule. So far a few regulars have already made themselves heard and we’re looking forward to seeing the outcome of crowd-sourcing a schedule in this way! The Sunday event is at Museum of Science and Industry, which a fun place to go for geeks and, like the morning event, is free entry!

Hoping to see lots of you there at the conference this year – last year’s event was brilliant with an excellent atmosphere, and this year looks to be better again. I can’t wait :)

26 Aug
2009

First Steps with bzr-svn

I’m an SVN nut – love it, use it, talk about it at any opportunity, can’t physically write code without it. But as a telecommuting developer who is sometimes travelling around, I’ve been thinking for a while that one of the distributed systems would really make more sense. I tried git ages ago and decided that I just wasn’t smart enough to use it; I’m so comfortable and confident with subversion and it is such a change.

I know there are alternatives out there, I saw a talk about bzr at LUGRadioLive last year and I have some canonical-associated friends who use it so I know the community is good and I can get some help if I need it. I confided in a fellow developer that I’d struggled with git, but that I’d also read that bzr would be more subversion-like which seemed ideal for me since that’s my background. His response? “No, bzr isn’t easier for people coming from SVN, bzr is just easier“. So I figured I’d give it a go.

I’m an ubuntu user so I installed the bzr, bzrtools and bzr-svn packages, and read the user guide – the user guide is absolutely excellent and I wish every tool in the world had instructions like these! Anyway here’s a quick outline of how I got started and used bzr against my existing SVN repository (it seems too much like hard work to start migrating repos before I’ve decided if I like the tool).

Who Am I?

Tell bzr your name and email so it can credit your commits to you:

 bzr whoami "Lorna Mitchell "

Good start :)

Checkout from SVN

There are several ways to set yourself up to work with bzr-svn, I chose the simplest, and checked out from SVN using bzr, then branched locally and worked on that. First we initialise a directory as a bzr repository:

bzr init-repo --default-rich-root snapshot

Then I actually did the checkout.

bzr checkout http://svn.rivendell.local/snapshot/trunk trunk

So at this point I have a current working copy of code.

Bzr Branching

So that I could work locally and commit at intermediate stages between commits to the SVN repo, I then made a local bzr branch of this checkout. This is the bit that’s a bit different to subversion, the branch is just local to you, more like a working copy. It was quite easy:

bzr branch trunk working

So I’ll now make my changes in the working branch I just created, this becomes my web root if its a web app for example.

Comitting

Using the “bzr commit” command from the branch we created (“working” directory in the examples) only commits locally to the branch. You can do this as many times as you need/want to until your feature is ready (or maybe until you can get back to a connection).

Updating

I realised at this point that I needed to update from the repo to pick up some changes someone else had made, to do this I needed to update my checkout and then pull the changes into my branch:

cd ../trunk
bzr update
cd ../working
bzr pull

To give a clearer idea of how this all goes togehter, I drew a diagram of the repo, the checkout, the branch, and how the process works to get between them all (click to see it at a sensible size):

Status

The “bzr status” command shows what changes are local to the current directory.

Conveying Changes Back To Repo

I made a couple of changes in my working directory and then wanted to put these back to the repo. So from the checkout (“trunk” directory in my example), I merged the changes in and then committed.

bzr merge ../working/
bzr commit

My changes were then in the SVN repo exactly as normal, bzr-svn means extra functionality for me but nobody else necessarily needs to change tools and all the hooks and backup routines and everything that are already in place for this repo can be kept. I’m happy with that outcome!

Next Steps

This is a very basic usage of bzr, really I’m only recording my own experience to make these concepts clearer in my own mind. I plan to do a lot more with this tool and will keep blogging as I go along. Comments, corrections, suggestions and questions are all very welcome – add a comment :)

24 Aug
2009

PHPWomen Merchandise

A few weeks ago, phpwomen.org put out an announcement about merchandise. When we first started the group (almost 3 years ago, believe it or not) we printed t-shirts and gave them out at conferences. Once the various founder members and a few benefactors had paid for a set of t-shirts each it became clear that this wasn’t a sustainable venture. So, after much happening in the background getting set up as a non-profit and getting a bank account (thanks mostly to lig!) and a bunch of time spent sorting out two spreadshirt shops (thanks Elizabeth!), it is now possible to buy merchandise online in both North America and Europe! The big problem with cafepress is the shipping costs for everyone outside of North America so spreadshirt seemed like a better option … still not ideal for our members further afield however and perhaps we can work out some better alternatives over time.

So, with great excitement I ordered my new phpwomen shirt (in girl fit!) – and here it is:

New PHPWomen Shirt

Note: This is the large size … I’m not small but I’m not really that large either so order a bigger size if you are ordering the girl fit shirts.

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the announcement post and follow the links to order your shirt and support the organisation – just in time for the autumn conference season!