If I survive that lot and the accompanying partying networking then I’ll be one happy girl. Wish me luck, and if you’re going – I’ll see you there :)
The first thing to say about submitting talks, is that there are no pre-requisites. You don’t need to be published, well-known, or have letters after your name (in the PHP community, the latter is probably more hindrance than help). If you want to go to a conference, and there is a topic you’d like to share some thoughts on, then write them down and submit! A lot of conferences have a Call for Papers – usually this will be an online form where you put in your personal details and the details of the talk you’d like to give. If it sounds simple, that’s because it really is …
It can be tricky to know what to write in the boxes and how to sell your talk to the conference organisers. The call for papers should give information about the themes of the conference, the expected audience, and the kind of content they are looking for – so pay attention to this. Usually you’ll be expected to submit an “abstract”, this is a description of your talk that will be put on the schedule if you are accepted. A good way to get started with these is to read the abstracts from current conferences – these are the ones that got through the selection process and will give you a good idea of what you should say here. Its usual to also be asked to supply a biography, either when you submit your talk or when the talk gets announced as part of the conference schedule.
If there is room for additional information, then give it – and give the organisers as many opportunities as possible to feel like you would be a positive and safe addition to their event. I’ve seen a few variations on these but for the phpnw call for papers, we added a box which we didn’t publish the contents of and where speakers could tell us why we should have them and/or their talk. This was illuminating, responses varied from “because this topic is so cool!” to “not sure really, thought it might be interesting though” and the unforgettable “meow” (that last one was from an entry that didn’t get accepted – it was hard to tell if the speaker was taking the whole thing seriously or not).
My advice is to start planning your submission in plenty of time – take a look at the information that you will need to supply and make sure you have it all (and do write in the optional boxes). Its also a really good idea to bounce your idea off some other people, who can help proofread and point out any obvious problems with your submission – for example the time I tried to submit a talk to a PHP conference without the word “PHP” anywhere in my proposal …
I have yet to successfully submit a talk via a Call for Papers and be accepted to speak at a conference – so I have no idea how to get talks accepted. If anyone else can add advice on this topic, that would be great :)
Most of what I said wasn’t on the slides, but the gist of it was along the lines of:
I had a great night and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as I did – and if you were there, are you asking questions yet?
My employers, Ibuildings, have been running a series of seminars where we invite a few people (and it is a few, they are generally small events), bring some of our developers along, and have some technical tutorials, demonstrations and general discussions, and some food. The previous events have all been well-received and sound very civilised (and there’s food, which is always good!)
I’m happy to announce that Ibuildings is venturing north of the Watford Gap – and the next event will be in Leeds, on the 9th September, the full details are at http://www.ibuildings.com/events/leeds. The main tutorial session will cover source control with Subversion, including advanced concepts such as merging and repository structures. We’ll also look at deployment strategies for different types of software development processes and tools that can be helpful in this area. I’m delivering the main tutorial at this event, and if that wasn’t enough incentive, I’m also bringing the nabaztag as my glamourous assistant!
We’ll be running events in a lot of other areas of the UK as well, so if you can’t make this one then watch out for more announcements or tell us where we should be running the next one! If you have any queries about any of these events then feel free to contact me, I hope I’ll see some of you in Leeds in September.
Edit: I prepared a video of the nabaztag demo I did – you can find it over here on flickr – enjoy.
My talk was entitled “PHP Deployment with Subversion” and was a series of suggested tricks for using Subversion, both tools and structure, to help with deployment. I’m on holiday in Amsterdam for a few days (since I haven’t visited the city before) so I’m currently not able to upload my slides but I will post them here in a day or two. You can get a sneak preview though as there is flickr evidence of my presentation available.
I included a demonstration in my talk which showed a nabaztag (electronic funky rabbit device) notifying of different events, such as tests failing. What I hadn’t really taken into account was that I’d be speaking in such a large room – there was seating for 400 people (about half full I think) and the rabbit is only 8 inches high or so, he was a bit little! I wasn’t following the chatter at the time but I was hugely amused to see this tweet from Breuls when I checked twitter the next day!!
Overall my talk was relatively successful in the sense that I said what I wanted to, I didn’t talk too much or too little, and my nabaztag demo actually worked. I do feel however that my nerves got the better of me – I’m rarely intimidated but having never spoken at a conference before I found it very difficult to adapt to speaking in the main hall. This is the first time I’ve used a microphone, they clipped it onto me and then I started giving the presentation, that was really strange. And also having a large stage with my slides projected on a screen the size of a small house … you can’t look at them, or point at them, or anything. I thought I’d become less nervous with time but I’m afraid it never happened! On a personal level, to give a talk like that, perfectly competently, is an achievement in itself and I’m trying to forget how hard it really was and just feel proud instead :) After the talk I only got one question, which was “Where can I get one of those rabbits?”, so I wasn’t sure if I had put my technical content across well. However quite a few people came to pick my brain afterwards so I guess I did OK.
I owe huge thanks to everyone who provided moral support and tried to convince me I’d be fine, and even more thanks to my boyfriend Kevin who did the setup for the nabaztag (Naz the nabaztag needed his own wireless network) and helped me write the code to run the demo. I’ll write more about the rabbit and the demo at a later point, looks like a lot of people will be getting them :)
Speaking aside, I had a great few days meeting old friends and new ones at the conference, and attending some really interesting sessions. Speaking was very very stressful although perhaps only because I didn’t handle it as well as I might have. The definite upside though is getting to hang out with the very cool kids at the Speakers Dinner afterwards – thanks guys, I had a wonderful night. All in all I can’t wait for next year!
I’ve been able to catch up with a lot of people since arriving late last night and making the mistake of not going to bed until late because I wasn’t tired (still on UK time) and then having to get up early today! Tonight we have an Ibuildings employees event which will be great, I’m excited to put faces to names for all my colleagues – the downside of the telecommute is that I mostly know people on Skype or IRC and not in real life. Later on there is a pre-conference social as well (from 8pm) – which is why my day is only half done :)
Looking forward to tomorrow, when there will be a phpwomen stand upstairs outside the main hall, we’ll be giving out shirts (they’re white this year) so if you want one then come and get it! Tomorrow at 2pm I’m giving my talk “PHP Deployment with Subversion” which looks like it will be well attended. Oh and its Worldwide Knit In Public Day as well so I’ll be attempting to fit that in as well!
When I was invited (or perhaps that should be “volunteered”) to speak at this event, I realised that I would need a lot of preparation in order to be able to deliver something like this. I arranged to give short technical presentations at local GeekUp events and went to both Leeds and Sheffield and spoke there. When I had assembled the content of the talk for Amsterdam, I circulated the slides around a few technical colleagues and friends, to make sure that it was accurate and covering sensible material. I was also charmed and excited to have the chance to attend the PHP London User Group meet last week and to give the actual talk there. So, at this point, there is little more I can do to prepare other than attempt not to get too drunk at the pre-conference social on Friday night!
The social side of things is something I’m really looking forward – this conference is organised by my employers, so I’ll have the opportunity to meet the developers I work with every day but haven’t met yet or don’t see often. This in itself I know will be fabulous, although I will certainly forget everyone’s names! In addition there will be people I know online from #phpc and of course some members of phpwomen.org as well – we are running a PHP Women stand at the conference and giving out shirts – so if you want one you had better come along and ask nicely :) I am also looking forward to meeting new people that I don’t yet know I’m going to meet – so here’s hoping for a wonderful time and not too many talk nerves!! To recover I’m staying on in Amsterdam for a few days since I haven’t visited the city before, seems like a good opportunity.