Tag Archives: conference

12 May
2010

A “new” Netbook for Conferences

A couple of years ago, I attended ZendCon for the first time. At that time, the only laptop I had was a work machine weighing 5kg, and I was staying in a different hotel from the main conference – so I hastily bought pretty much the first non-ee netbook on the market (which was released about a week before my trip) and took that with me to the event. There were lots of limitations of it but I didn’t have a whole lot of choice … since then I’ve improved it significantly!

More than 512 MB RAM

I’ve now had the machine more than 18 months and I’ve been using it for events and keeping it by the bed pretty much ever since. However this year I’m speaking at TEK-X in Chicago and found myself wondering if I should get a new little machine to take with me. A few months back I upgraded the RAM in the machine (it had 512 MB originally!), and I came to the conclusion that actually, I didn’t need to splash out for a new netbook since with a bit more memory, its pretty usable.

Bigger Battery Life

Instead of replacing the machine, I bought the extended battery for the aspireone, taking me from about 2 hours to about 6 (I think, haven’t tried this battery life in anger yet). Its chunky, but not offensive:

DSCF1476

It is quite a bit heavier than the old one – my original post about getting the aspireone weighed it with its original battery at 971g and with the extended battery, its 1274g, which is still only half the weight of my current work laptop.

DSCF1480

Kubuntu Netbook Edition

Reading back to that original post about the netbook it was pretty obvious that I was hating that operating system. A couple of years ago, the support for aspireone in Ubuntu Netbook Remix became usable, and I installed that. Its been fabulous and I had no intention to do anything more than upgrade … until someone at OggCamp showed me they had the Kubuntu Netbook edition on their netbook.

DSCF1486

It is shiny and blue, and since I use KDE on my laptop I couldn’t resist and I upgraded it with a week to go before I take it as my only machine as a speaker at a conference!

In Summary

I haven’t spent a lot of money on the upgrades, the battery was about 50 GBP and the RAM came out of something else. I did have a large capacity SD card in the expansion slot since I only have 8GB hard drive. Then there was a problem with the machine suspending with the expansion slot in use and at around the same time I got a camera that takes SD … so I put my big card into there instead :) I don’t keep data on the netbook so its not an issue for me. I’ll be flying to Chicago for Tek in a few days, and presenting off my netbook as usual. For a budget machine with a little bit of love and attention added in, “Merry” (short for Merope) the netbook has been quite a fabulous investment!

10 May
2010

Podcast: How and Why to Become a Speaker

This is a podcast version of my rant-in-the-bar advice to anyone thinking about speaking, or wondering how to begin. Personally I think many more people could be sharing their expertise at events than actually do so, and I would really like anyone who wants to get involved to have a starting point. So if that’s you, and you have a spare ten minutes to listen to my thoughts on the subject, then the mp3 is here.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any other advice you’d give to someone who isn’t yet speaking.

28 Apr
2010

Speaking at PHPNW May

Next week I’m speaking at the PHPNW User Group in Manchester on Tuesday Evening, 4th May – full details of the event are on upcoming.org. The talk isn’t directly about PHP though; I’ll be giving my “Open Source Your Career” talk, discussing how contributing to the community can really help your professional rise. I’ll be giving the this talk at the TEK-X conference in Chicago a few weeks later as well, hope to see you at either one event or the other!
12 Apr
2010

Importing Data to Joind.In

Update! This post is now outdated – the import functionality on joind.in has been replaced with a CSV import.

As a conference organiser I work extensively with the site joind.in, which allows attendees to comment on sessions at a conference. Recently the site has also started supporting sessions with both times and tracks, making it indispensable as a way of keeping track of all the sessions during an event. The only downside is entering all the data into it!! Joind.in does have some import functionality, which I recently rebuilt to reflect the timings and track changes, however this only accepts XML at present, so there is still some preparation work to get your data ready to import.

I know I’m not the only conference organiser who will have this problem so here’s my step-by-step guide to getting talk information into joind.in, easily and quickly. For up-to-date documentation on the joind.in import process and the official data format description, see http://joind.in/about/import.

Set up Event and Tracks

Step one is to submit your event to joind.in. When it is approved by the administrators you will receive notification and it will appear publicly on the site (joind.in also supports private events, see the website for more information).

Once it is approved, make sure the timezone is set correctly by editing your event. For me this is Europe/Amsterdam, since I’m setting up data for the Dutch PHP Conference.

If you are going to include information about the different tracks, either rooms or subject tracks, you can set these up now (if not, then skip to the next section). When viewing an event, if you are logged in and have admin rights on that event, you will see an “Event Admin” box. The “Event Tracks” screen will let you add, edit and remove the tracks for your event.

Prepare Your Data

I had the talks in a spreadsheet and I found this was a good starting point. Each row is imported independently so each one needs to contain all the information about the session. My spreadsheet had the following columns:

  • Date
  • Time
  • Track (string name matching the track you set up earlier)
  • Type (either “Social Event”, “Talk”, “Keynote”, or “Workshop”)
  • Speaker
  • Session
  • Abstract

There was a lot of duplication here, for example lots of copied and pasted dates, but for each row to be evaluated separately, we need it to look like this. At this point I exported the spreadsheet to .csv format but joind.in currently only supports XML so I still had to built the format it could understand.

Generate the XML

I wrote a little script that processed my CSV file and spat out the XML that joind.in was expecting. There are a few pitfalls with this step:

  • I’m British, so my date formats assume dd/mm/yyyy
  • The import doesn’t support languages (see http://github.com/enygma/joind.in/issues#issue/91)
  • The script contains a function copy/pasted out of the joind.in codebase to handle the timezones calculation (because I already had it working once, I just stole it)
  • The first row in the spreadsheet is assumed to contain titles and is ignored
  • The script has a hardcoded timezone in it for Europe/Amsterdam

By now you can guess this use-once script is a bit of a mess but in case it is useful I am uploading it here (if nothing else, I guess I might use it again!). I considered adding support for CSV files into joind.in itself (I’m a contributor) but I was short on time – if this would be useful to you or if you have any other comments on the process then add them here and I will do my best to reply!

Resources

  • Conversion script for CSV files to Joind.in XML format (use at your own peril!) csvToXml.txt – change the file extension to .php
  • My original spreadsheet, in case an example is helpful talks.csv – this is the data for DPC 2010
05 Mar
2010

PHP London Conference: In Review

I’m really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people – this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag in history #phpuk2010!

This year I had the privilege of speaking at this event, although I was concerned that I had to stay coherent and alert right through to the graveyard slot at 4:30pm (conference organisers take note: I really am much sparklier in the mornings!). I kept myself awake by attending what I affectionately refer to as the “Ibuildings track” – with 4 speakers at the event, it did feel like a bit of an invasion by myself and my colleagues. In our defence I can only say that we are a pretty big local PHP employer and, as a developer, I’m happy to be working for someone who sends all their developers to these events, and even happier to be in the company of those other excellent speakers as colleagues!

My talk was entitled “Best Practices in Web Service Design” although perhaps “Things I Wish Web Service Creators Would Consider Before Writing Unclear and Unstable Useless And Frustrating Services” would have been a better title! I talked about web services in general, a bit about HTTP and the various service types, and also gave some general tips and tricks for writing good, stable services. In a bit of a break with geeky tradition, I then talked about services as a whole package, and how to deliver and document them in a way that helps users help themselves. If you are interested the slides are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/best-practices-in-web-service-design

The experience was overall very positive for me, I haven’t spoken at this conference before and I was very pleased to be included. My talk went quite smoothly, with my nerves nicely hidden away (I’ve had issues with this lately), and I also avoided falling over either the curtain or the piece of screen that was carefully placed to trip unwary speakers! I’d like to thank everyone who came and asked questions afterwards, and all those who saw my talk and left comments for me on my joind.in talk page – it all helps me to do better next time, thanks and I’ll see you all next year!

03 Feb
2010

PHPBenelux: Recap

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Since Ibuildings is partly a dutch company I combined this with one of my regular trips to meet with the people there, visiting both our offices in the Netherlands and catching up with a bunch of colleagues in both locations before making my way to Belgium for the main event.

The conference itself was very well organised and the venue worked very nicely. I liked the hotel (I’m accustomed to London hotel rooms so European ones always seem huge), which was nice and had an English slant on breakfast since sausages were available alongside the cheese and pastries! The venue itself was just across the car park and had plenty of rooms with an open exhibition space which worked nicely – the two tracks were on opposite sides of this space so the footfall for the exhibitors was hopefully good! Full marks go to the crew:

phpbnl10 crew

I gave my talk “Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World” with some updates since I first gave it at PHPNW09 in Manchester. This is a nice best practices talk and although I didn’t have a lot of people in my talk, this was no surprise since Ivo was speaking in the same slot as me with his “PHP and the Cloud” talk, which I STILL haven’t seen! If you are interested my slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/passing-the-joel-test-in-the-php-world-phpbnl10 Thanks to my audience who were great and managed to stay enthusiastic despite my nerves and the late afternoon slot :)

Here’s to PHPBenelux 2011!

12 Jan
2010

Dutch PHP Conference: Call for Papers Now Open

There is an announcement over on the DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) website – their Call for Papers is now open (so go submit!). What’s remarkable about this announcement is that I wrote it, and its signed with my name and the words “Your host this year” … yes, I’m hosting DPC.

I’m pretty excited about this, I love getting involved with events and I also love DPC as an event, so together these are pretty special. DPC is organised by my employers, Ibuildings – so I actually get paid to get involved with this conference, which is pretty cool :) The submissions have already started coming in to the call for papers and the quality and variety of the talks, from people I know well and others I’ve never heard of, is staggering. I’m hoping that this trend continues right through until the CfP closes on 31st January. The task of choosing the tasks will be very difficult but we have a panel of selectors ready to step up to the challenge – and I’m already excited about how good this year’s event is going to be!

07 Jan
2010

Speaking at TEK·X

I’m always pleased to be accepted as a speaker but I’m especially delighted to hear that I’m speaking at TEK·X in Chicago this May. They had a crazy number of submissions for the number of slots available, and I really wanted to go since I spoke there last year and enjoyed the event hugely! This year I’m giving the following sessions:

PHP Best Practices (tutorial) – This is a half-day tutorial with my good friend Matthew Weier O’Phinney covering all sorts of good stuff you can do when you develop PHP. Its a general session and the aim is that everyone in the room takes away something new from our tips and tricks (and stories of what *NOT* to do!)

SVN in a Distributed World I’m giving this talk for the first time, looking at how traditional source control (subversion) compares with the newer distributed version control solutions (git, bzr). There’s been lots of buzz around git but in the PHP world we choose our tools on merit, not on cool factor, so this is a chance for me to share my experiences with both types of systems and talk a bit about which scenarios the various tools are a good fit for.

Open Source Your Career Another new talk! This one is about how much personal gain there is being an open source contributor. I’ve grown hugely, both personally and professionally, from my experience with user groups, events, and software in the open source space – so I’ll be sharing some tips on how things can work out well all round.

If you’re going to the conference, then do make sure to stop me and say “hi” – there are so many people at these events that sometimes I miss out on meeting people I’d like to have spoken to. You can’t miss me, I’m the woman with the English accent and curly hair!! I had an absolutely great time last year and I’m already looking forward to this year’s conference!

11 Dec
2009

Speaking at PHPUK

I’m pleased to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at PHPUK in London in February. I’ve attended this conference for the last three years, and attend its related user group, PHP London whenever I can find a reason to be in London on the right day. My talk this time is a brand new one, “Best Practices for Web Service Design”, which covers the main points (and pitfalls!) of architecting a web service to be as robust and useful as possible. This is something I’ve been doing quite a bit of in my day job lately and I’m hoping to pass on some of what I’ve learned.

This conference is well-established and I’ve had a blast most years I’ve attended! Although their schedule isn’t public yet (it will be soon), the other sessions I’ve heard about on the grapevine sound good. If you want to attend, the date is Friday 26th February and you can buy your tickets on their site. Let me know if I will see you there :)

30 Nov
2009

Speaking at PHP Benelux 2010

I’m delighted to announce that I’m speaking at the inaugural PHP Benelux Conference, to be held on Saturday 30th January in Antwerp, Belgium. The talk will be “Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World”; I gave this talk PHPNW09 in October and it was well-received there, so hopefully I can bring the same insight and inspiration to attendees at this new event as well!

On a personal level I’m very pleased to have a reason to visit the Low Countries – Ibuildings is a dutch company and I’m already making plans to link up with my colleagues there by extending the trip by a few days. I’ve also never been to Antwerp so I’m hoping I’ll see something of the city while I’m there, if time allows. The benelux user group contains many friends so I’m looking forward to what I know will be an excellent event and catching up with all the friends who will be there.

If you are attending, or thinking of it, let me know – and come and say “hi” to me on the day :)