LornaJane

The slides for my talk "PHP Deployment with Subversion" at the Dutch PHP Conference last weekend are now online, you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/php-deployment-with-svn/. If you have any questions or comments then either drop me a line or add a comment below.

Edit: I prepared a video of the nabaztag demo I did - you can find it over here on flickr - enjoy.

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the excellent Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I haven't done anything like this before and I did a lot of preparation - as you'll know if you read this blog regularly.

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!

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at the PHP London group, giving a talk entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion". This is the talk I will be giving next week at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, and giving the same talk last night was the last step in a whole series of preparation for next week. (The slides will be available after the Dutch conference)

As ever it was great to get to the event and meet the people there, I don't make it to the PHP London meetings very often but I always have a good time when I do. Although this talk was supposed to be a "test drive" for next week, I was actually very squeaky happy to get the invite to speak! Anyway the guys there were great as usual, helping me get set up with the projector, providing a pep talk, and buying me a beer afterwards.

The talk itself went fine, nothing more and nothing less. It was perfect for time, which is excellent as I had absolutely no idea how long I would talk for. I was greatly helped by using Powerpoint (yes, I had to boot into windows, scary!) with its Presenter View which has a timer. This view also shows you your current slide, the notes for this slide, and the upcoming slides which is all good (so long as you can read very tiny writing from standing 4 feet away from your laptop - happily I'm long-sighted!). The content I think is OK - lots of questions came out after the talk which was really interesting, and I certainly realised there were a few points that I need to mention when I give the talk again. The slides perhaps leave something to be desired, colours look different projected and there was a particularly horrible shade of yellow which appears on quite a few slides - oops!

I had a great night and although I wouldn't say I'm feeling confident for next week, I feel like there are fewer unknowns. I also came to terms with the idea that feeling terrible about a talk is just not something I'm going to get over until I have done the talk - its all part of the preparation I guess.

I'm pleased to announce that DevZone have published an article of mine - the examples article I wrote to accompany my recent podcast on the topic of importing and migrating data. It has some code examples which I think make a good illustration of the points I was trying to make waving my hands around doing a podcast, hope you like it.

I'm the guest on this week's php|abstract podcast from DevZone, talking about some techniques for importing and migrating data. I have a few pet strategies for dealing with this and they're outlined on the podcast so dip in and let me know what you think.

There will also be a follow-up article to go with it - showing some code examples, because sometimes its easier to think of things when they are written down.

Since SugarCRM only works with PHP5 in non-WSDL mode, I had to create all my calls from scratch. The SugarCRM documentation is somewhat minimal, as I may have mentioned, and I found I was mostly reading the WSDL to figure out how to format my SOAP calls. I've put together a post with working examples but I've also assembled a list of the data types needed. Click through to read more.