Last week I was at the php|tek 2009 conference in Chicago. This was a really exciting trip for me – only my second conference as a speaker and the first time I’d attended any of the MTA conferences. I was absolutely delighted to have three of my sessions accepted into the schedule – although it seemed like a lot of preparation, I actually headed out to the conference feeling relatively prepared.

Tutorial Day

I spent the morning finalising slides with my co-presenter Matthew Weier O’Phinney … well, we looked at the slides before we wandered off to Starbucks anyway :) The trouble with preparing talks with someone that is both on the other side of the world and has a wildly important job (and gets promoted in the middle) is that its sort of hard to get together and organise these things. Actually the material was in surprisingly good shape on the day and our session was well-received – the slides are available.

Immediately after our session, Matthew and I were interviewed by Keithy Casey and the video is available if you’re interested.

Thursday

After a relaxing Wednesday where all I did was show up to sessions and get my picture taken with the phpwomen, Thursday was a pretty crazy day. I had two talks scheduled, and both were in rooms that turned out to be unbearably hot. First I gave a talk on a topic I’m actually really excited about – Linux-Fu for PHP Developers – which was an overview of the commands I type when I’m working with linux. You can see the slides but I’m considering splitting this talk into two sections if I want to give it again – one introductory and one all about the tools I used. It’s the tools that are most exciting and I think that came across when I was giving the talk.

A couple of hours later I gave a talk entitled “Using and Understanding the Community” with my Ibuildings colleague Stefan Koopmanschap. I was surprised how many people attended the talk – there was a great atmosphere in the room and best of all were the people who came up to me later to say we’d inspired them to get more involved. I was even more surprised to have Cal Evans inform me later in the day that we had a slot scheduled in the uncon for the following day to give the talk again for those who missed it! There are no slides for this talk, since we only had one slide with a few URLs on it, however the second edition of the talk was recorded so the audio I guess will get published at some point – I’ll post here when this happens.

Things got a bit more light-hearted at this point as we had a slot in the unconference for a PHPWomen Craft Hour. All sorts of people turned up and knitted, crocheted, made lace, dismantled novelty cars, made pipe cleaner animals, and all sorts of other things. We had a great laugh and it was cool to meet some new faces. Hope we do this again sometime!

Finally for this day I gave a more serious uncon slot (with the craft still going on at the back of the room!) entitled “Architecting Web Services” – this is a talk I’ll be giving in Leeds this week at the FOWA Tour so it was great to try out the session with such a qualified audience at php|tek. Many thanks to those to attended and gave their input, I’ve re-worked the slides and will post them after giving the talk tomorrow.

Conclusion

All in all it was a great week – meeting new friends and catching up with old ones, and getting some great technical content in terms of both talks and hallway discussions too. Thanks to everyone who helped me have such a great time there – hope to see you all in the future :)

This year I’m excited to be heading to the php|tek conference in Chicago (May 19th to 22nd), and even more excited to be going there as a speaker. Over the course of the conference I will present or co-present three sessions; one tutorial and two talks.

The tutorial session is a half-day on Tuesday afternoon – I’m co-presenting with Matthew Weier O’Phinney of Zend and our session is “Practical SVN for PHP Developers”. We’ll be walking through the concepts of source control, adminstering subversion, repository structure strategies and also showing some hands-on use of subversion. We’ll talk about the issues around introducing subversion into a team and looking at how this tool fits in as part of the development process. If you’re a subversion user looking to learn to get more fromthe tool, an architect looking to include it in new or existing setups, or a development team leader or manager looking for information about setting up and managing subversion, then come along!

The next talk I’ll give is on Wednesday when I’ll be presenting “Linux-Fu for PHP Developers”. If you’re already a linux wizard then feel free to drop by and heckle – but if you’re either a beginner or a competent user looking to raise your game then this session is for you. Its a tour of the commands I use day-to-day; an opportunity to metaphorically look over my shoulder and take a peek at the tools I use and how I use them. There are code samples and although there is a lot to take in, I hope it will make command-line linux usevery approachable for everyone – if I can do it, anyone can :)

Finally I get to co-present with my friend and Ibuildings colleague Stefan Koopmanschap a session entitled “A Guide to Using and Understanding the Community”. This session is an overview of what happens in the community outside of people’s nine-to-five jobs, how to access the community and what you might find there if you do. A lot of the value of open source software is in the community but knowing what information and interactions you can find there and how to find them is a mystery to many. For business in particular, free software with no guarantees can be slightly daunting! Stefan and I have lots of community involvement and will give a tour of what’s happening, how you or your employees can gain fromthe community, and how you can give back.

I’m really looking forward to the conference, to meeting old friends, virtual friends, and friends I haven’t made yet – if you will be there let me know and make sure to come and say “hi”!

I’m delighted (and somewhat stunned) to announce that I’ll be speaking at php|tek in Chicago this May – you might also like to see the full timetable. This is one of the big events of the year and I was so desperate to attend that I gave the organisers a good choice of talks to choose from. The good news is, they accepted me. The slightly scary news is, I’ll be giving three sessions!

• Practical SVN for PHP Developers – a half-day tutorial session I’ll be delivering jointly with Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Zend Framework’s Chief Architect, fellow subversion nut, and good friend
• Linux-Fu for PHP Developers – tour of the command line tools I use
• A Guide to Using and Understanding the Community – another joint session, this time with my colleague and friend Stefan Koopmanschap

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 :)