LornaJane

Tips for Event Hosting: On The Day

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:48:17 +0000

This post is the second in a series of three about organising and hosting events. If you're interested, you could also read the first post about event preparation.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. Namebadges (sticky labels and pen if nothing else) will be needed at registration, if you have tickets and need to tick people off then rope in lots of volunteers (it sounds like a lot but 3-5% of your total attendee count is ideal) and brief them, and spread out across as much space as you have so you can parallelise as much as possible - registration is always chaos because of course everyone shows up at once and causes a backlog! If your event has a timetable, this should be posted on the walls and also given as a handout so everyone knows what is happening where. Have room managers to let speakers know when their session is over and to wrestle people off the stage (yes, seriously) if they run over their slot! When you run to time, people get fed when they expect to and don't have to climb out over the rest of the audience when they have to rush off to catch their train or whatever because the event should have finished. It just makes the whole thing less stressful for everyone.

In the morning, make sure you are at the venue well before your attendees to check wifi, projectors, sound, room layout, setup registration and welcome any early arrivals and direct them at the coffee. If you have exhibitors then you'll need to make sure they can get access a couple of hours ahead of the doors opening. The upshot of this is that you will be hosting the conference social at midnight and letting exhibitors into the venue at 7am, possibly for a number of days in a row ... event organising is physically and emotionally demanding and if you are having fun with your friends then you are probably doing it wrong (harsh but the best conference hosts I know keep circulating and hosting from dawn to dusk and beyond).

During the event, keep an eye on twitter and run searches for your hashtag. This is a great way to know that one of the rooms is too hot/cold or that people aren't sure what time something is happening. Use the official account to respond to these enquiries and tag your responses with the hashtag too so everyone sees your message as well as the complaints.

Most of all, remember that if you guests have the impression that the event is going smoothly, then it probably is! As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well :)

Do you have any more on-the-big-day advice for events? Add a comment!

Printable PDF Handouts from OpenOffice Impress

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:31:00 +0000

Last week I was preparing a training course for a client, and I wanted to print the slides nicely for the attendees to refer to and make notes on etc. The slides were done, I'd talked to my friendly printers (Mailboxes etc in Leeds) and all I needed to do was generate the handouts. Which was fine until I googled for help with doing that from OpenOffice, only to find that although it has this awesome "Export to PDF" functionality for documents, slides, etc, it wasn't going to do it for handouts.

I'm an ubuntu user, and it turns out that there's a clever package called cups-pdf which installs a pretend printer, and anything you could print, you can turn into a PDF. Brilliant. I installed it with aptitude and instantly I had a printer named "PDF" which printed to a /home/lorna/PDF directory.

Did I mention I love ubuntu?

I also wanted to add a cover page to my document, before I sent the whole thing to the printers in a PDF file for them to print and bind. For this I simply created an OpenOffice document and used the usual export to PDF. By the magic of twitter, I got some great advice from EmmaJane and installed the package PDFShuffler which enabled me to combine the two documents and save the result as a PDF.

By the magic of open source, I have beautiful handouts :) Printing in Linux really has come a long way, I can't thank the developers and maintainers of all those libraries enough - all I did was install two packages!

Tips for Event Hosting: Preparation

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:58:47 +0000

I've been to a lot of events, mostly technical, software-related ones, and I've also helped organise a few as well. For people organising events for the first time there are definitely some pitfalls that might not be obvious until you actually, well, until you fall into them! I thought I'd capture my experiences into a series of blog posts, in case they can help any future organisers to avoid some of the traps. First up: what to do before your event starts.

People aren't very good at reading between the lines and doubt could mean they don't buy a ticket for your event. To combat this, put up a website well in advance and make it very easy to find out:

event location

event date

prices of tickets and how to get one

schedule or structure, basically what to expect and why people should be there

how to contact you

These are the absolute minimum. My recommendation is that you will also want to include (as early as this information can possibly be available) any extra items such as the dates and times of any social events (so people can include those in their travel plans), travel advice and/or directions, and for bonus points local knowledge such as where to stay, local facilities, etc. One year the PHP London conference did a full set of directions complete with photos - I can't find those now but I loved the idea and did something similar for PHPNW09.

Without this kind of information, people are much less likely to do the work to find it all out themselves, or may not feel confident enough to come along. I've also been bitten by events where the info was sketchy and the event turned out to be just as sketchy! Where the information is easily available, transport links are listed, and contact numbers given, the experience has been much smoother and more pleasant all round - this is especially relevant if you have speakers or attendees travelling internationally who may feel a bit lost when they are trying to make their way to the venue.

Make sure you also pick a hashtag for people to use when they are blogging or tagging tweets or photos, that way your attendees can start to make links with one another (and on a more negative note, you'll see when people are complaining and you can respond!). Already you are building the community that will make your event a success ... and if you've done all of the above then rest assured that you are absolutely on the right lines!

If you have any more tips, share them in the comments, I'm sure there are things I either missed or don't even know I should be doing!

Working with Web Services - Froscon 2010

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:21:01 +0000

This weekend I'm at froscon in Germany, giving two talks. One had no slides (but may have video, if I see it then I will post the link here) and the other was "Working with Web Services" which I gave this morning in the PHP room. My slides are here:

Working with web_services

View more presentations from Lorna Mitchell.

Thanks to the PHP room organisers for accepting me as a speaker and to Sebastian for twisting my arm in the first place - it's a fun event!

One-Step Symlink Switch

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:46:15 +0000

This is a trick I use when deploying websites so I thought I'd post it here for posterity. Actually, technically I stole it from someone else but for now let's pretend it's mine (thanks @__kb!)

When I deploy an application, which is almost invariably a PHP application, I like to put a whole new version of the code alongside the existing one that is in use, and when everything is in place, simply switch between the two. As an added bonus, if the sky falls in when the new version goes live, the previous version is uploaded and ready to be put back into service. In order to be able to do this, I have my document root pointing at a symlink, let's say it is called "current". (disclaimer: I have no knowledge of non-linux operating systems, this post is linux-specific)

When it is time to deploy, I place the new code onto the server, and create two new symlinks, one called "previous" which points to the same location as the "current" symlink does (bear with me) and one called "next" which points to the location of the new code. To deploy, all I need is this:

mv -fT next current

The f forces mv to overwrite the target if needs be, and the T directs mv to consider the second argument as a normal file, rather than as a directory to copy in to. The neat thing about doing it this way is that it happens in a single move, no weird results for people who manage to hit your site while you are typing the new symlink command or during the code updating. It is also just as simple to roll back from this, since you have a symlink pointing to the previously used code version.

I thought I'd share this snippet as it is a handy inclusion in deployment scripts/strategies. What are your tips for managing code deployment?

Geeks Can Write

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:25:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I gave a lightning talk at the PHPNW user group entitled "Geeks Can Write" or "Can Geeks Write?" - basically shooting down the worst of the excuses for not writing that I've heard and asking everyone to give it a shot! If you are interested, then the slides are on slideshare. Happy writing :)

CodeigniterCon 2010

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:52:00 +0000

I spent the weekend in Bristol so I could attend cicon2010 - a volunteer-organised first-edition conference around the CodeIgniter PHP Framework. It started on Saturday morning with registration at 8:30am and the first talk at 9am. When I arrived (at about ten to nine) there were no organisers there. I took this photo around 9:45 (the camera is on GMT) as they attempted to set up the projector.

I saw two talks, both of which were actually really good, which is pretty impressive when you're going on stage to a rather fed up audience! Kudos to Kevin Prince and Joel Gascoigne for their talks. By this time we did get an announcement about what times the other talks would happen and I snuck out for lunch and cups of tea.

When I popped back (I assume there was a long lunch as I didn't get there until almost 4 and still caught the last two talks) I saw Adam Griffiths and Phil Sturgeon round off the day with their talks, and I must admit that I think the talk content was spot on, although the speakers were mostly pretty inexperienced, they all had some great thoughts to share and I did get some technical content from it (and a list of new friends, thanks Phil!)

I had been looking forward to the conference social but after hanging about in a strange city on my own waiting for a promised tweet of time and location, I bailed. The people I met at cicon were a nice crowd and I'm sure it would have been fun but I got some other stuff done instead which was also useful.

In summary: nice people, useful content. worst event I think I've ever been to (sorry guys).

I tweeted about my disappointment and got a couple of people asking me what my advice is for events organisers. I've now done a few technical events and will wrap up my advice into a post (now I've outlined it, probably more than one post!) so look out for that over the next few weeks.

(as a total aside but kind of for the record, for an event with 40 ish people, I was disappointed to be the only woman there)

Leeds PHP User Group

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:25:00 +0000

There's a new PHP user group which has sprung up in my home town of Leeds - Leeds PHP. So far it has met twice and its been a good crowd both times. Our meetings at the moment are at Brewery Tap, which is not only the closest pub to the train station in Leeds, it's also got some great beers!

Meetings are the third Monday of the month, so the next one is 16th August where we'll have Ben Waine speak about Xdebug. If you're within commute of Leeds, then you should definitely head along there one month, look forward to seeing you!!

3 Top Tips for Database Naming

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:21:32 +0000

Perhaps this is more of a rant than a post but I do keep running into issues with databases with names that are inconsistent - which makes them really difficult to work with. When designing a database, there are a few points to consider:

Singular and Plural

This goes for table names, and also for the names of join tables. If you call your tables "user" and "group" then you probably want your linking tables to be "user_group". If you go for plurals (my personal favourite) then be consistent over whether the linking tables are called "user_groups" or "users_groups".

ID Columns

I've seen two main variations on the column names for primary keys, one is to call them all simply "id", and the other is to name them after their table name such as "user_id" or "group_id". It doesn't really matter but my recommendation is for the latter - that way, the user_id column in any other table clearly joins on to the user_id column in the users table, making it easy to read and understand.

Case and Capitalisation

Due to my EXtreme DOuble CApitalitis, I prefer everything to be lower case, but the key is consistency, so that it is easy for developers to get used to the patterns in the database setup and to develop against your schema without having to refer back to it all the time.

Consistency is Key

In general, I like database schemas which are predictable and well-laid-out. Although I have my own preferred conventions, I don't mind what is used so long as it is predominantly in step with itself - this makes my life as a developer so much easier! What's your top tip for sane database naming conventions? Leave a comment and let me know!

Migrating Github Contributors to an Organization

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:12:00 +0000

Recently, a github project that I contribute to, joind.in, moved from an ordinary github user account over to an organization. Getting contributors moved over is pretty straight forward, I have a fork of the main repo on github at http://github.com/lornajane/joind.in and that updated to show itself as being a fork of the organisation's repo rather than the original user repo that it had been set up under.

In fact, all I had to do was update my upstream remote on my local repo - I set this up following the excellent github forking instructions when I first forked the repo. All I did then was to check my remotes:

git remote

This showed my remotes with the "upstream" pointing to the old repo. So I copied the URL of the organization repo, removed the old version and added a new upstream:

git remote rm upstream
git remote add upstream git://github.com/joindin/joind.in.git

Everything now behaves as before while handling the new central repo for the project - hopefully this helps others with projects moving from user accounts to organizations (or organisations, as I keep typing, British spellings as always!)

Garage Clearance

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:26:09 +0000

When we bought this house, three years ago, we also bought the contents of it, which did bring us some nice furniture but also brought a staggering amount of junk. While the house has slowly emerged from the chaos, the garage has remained basically full, including a jacuzzi bath, more furniture, filing cabinets, and who knows what else. Repeated trips to the tip seemed to be making little impact and we had some of the old bits of wood out of the house which are too big for the car. This problem has been bothering us for ages, but last week we solved it! Kevin rang up wetakeanywaste.com who are local and will sort through the contents and recycle whatever they can before disposing of the rest in a responsible way. They were friendly, efficient, and not at all expensive - within a few hours we had a totally empty garage, very impressive!

They do house clearances and were even able to take the old gas bottles out of the garage, I was happy to know they would recycle stuff, and they just brought a truck and loaded it all up themselves, I only stopped working long enough to sign the paperwork and write the cheque :)

Keynoting at PHPNW10

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:55:26 +0000

I'm slightly surprised but mostly wildly excited to announce that I'll be the keynote speaker at the PHP North West Conference in October. It is held in Manchester in the UK, which is about an hour from where I live in Leeds, so it is definitely my "home" conference, and this makes me even more excited since I know I'll be in such great company!

The talk is Teach A Man To Fish: Coaching Development Teams and really it's about how a little investment of time or effort can build your existing team into something better - and how that team can then sustain its improvements and continue to raise its performance and the game of the individual team members. All in all I am pretty excited about this talk - as with most of my conference talks, it started life as a rant in a bar, and I'm now excited to be preparing it for a more formal setting!

The event itself is a must-see for anyone doing PHP or allied technologies that can get there (Manchester is pretty central and pretty cheap - if you're in the UK, you have no excuses!). It's a Saturday event, 9th October 2010 and tickets are on sale - the Early Bird prices are still available and we've held the prices as low as possible again, we don't need frills, we just want lots of people to be able to join in! I hope to see quite a few of you there, let me know if you're coming :)

WordCamp

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:54:03 +0000

Last weekend I was at WorkCampUK in Manchester - it's taken me this long to writ the blog post because I needed time to download my photos, however I've now done that and I didn't get anything at all worth publishing, d'oh!

I am a wordpress user and even wrote a plugin once, but I'm an outsider in terms of community so I was looking forward to finding out more about the people involved with wordpress. I expected to meet some friendly folk and I was not disappointed at all - there was a wonderful range of people there, right from people wanting to start a blog to people making a living from wordpress development, and everyone in between. I attended talks on testing the internals of wordpress through to some case studies of sites built using it (thanks @simonwheatley) as well as sessions on plugins, business, and web technologies.

My biggest thankyou of the weekend goes to the Genius @pgibbs who took the time to reply to my tweet-appeal for someone to review my wordpress plugin and spent a good chunk of his afternoon wading through my newbie code - I got loads of great pointers, thanks Paul!

The event ended on a slightly contraversial note with some input from the Automattic people who had come over to attend the event - they're putting a lot of work into improving the support for the communities running the WordCamps, which should have been good news, but one of the things that will change is that there's a move away from having WordCamp naming to WordCamp to make space for more events. Suddenly the crowd I thought were so friendly turned a bit hostile, which I found odd. I hope they know that their frankly awesome event will be frankly awesome wherever it is and whatever it is called, I shall be looking out for the details for next year and hoping to see some of the crowd at events between now and then!

edit: I forgot to say I made a particular new friend, @apeei - you can see us here

SugarCRM 6 Installation Error

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:50:27 +0000

I noticed that SugarCRM have just released their new version 6.0.0, and since my sugarcrm installation is madly out of date and I'm about to start using it again, I thought I'd just throw the old one away and install from scratch. I had no problems until I reached the final installation stage, when clicking the "install" button would return a 404. This is tedious because then you have to follow the instructions and change config.php so that "installer_locked" is false (but the installer does remember all the information you give it, which makes this less annoying)

After a couple of times around the loop I looked properly at the warnings on that final page before the "install" button, and made some php.ini changes in line with what it requested - increasing the memory_limit and the upload_file_size. I also installed php5-curl (I'm an ubuntu user so this is just an aptitude package for me) and the install ran like a dream at that point. I'm disappointed that SugarCRM couldn't give me better feedback than just a 404, but it seems like it needed some settings that I didn't have - so if you see the same behaviour, don't give up but heed the warnings and it should be able to install itself absolutely fine. Hope this helps!

Giving Up The Day Job

s9y@lornajane.net (LornaJane) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:02:00 +0000

The In-A-Nutshell Version I have resigned from Ibuildings. I will complete my notice period here in a couple of weeks and then move on to a wide and interesting variety of well-paying freelance assignments covering development, consultancy, writing and speaking. Hopefully.

The slightly longer version really is this. Two and a half years ago, I left a job at a type of company I usually describe as a yet-another-website company, where literally every new project was another CMS website. Which was fun for about the first 4 months and got old pretty quickly. Two and a half years at Ibuildings and I haven't done yet-another-anything, the projects have been technical, challenging and my colleagues are the best qualified set of people I'll probably ever work with.

Along the way I've also done a wide variety of other things, most of which are achievements beyond my wildest dreams, some within the scope of this job and some on my own time but of course influenced by all that I've learned. I've delivered training, led projects, been published, become a regular conference speaker and travelled internationally doing so, collaborated on an open source project, edited a developer portal and hosted a major international PHP conference. I've even learned to say those things about myself in public without feeling too much of a fraud!

At this point, there are so many things I want to be doing, writing, speaking and so on, as well as some interesting development projects, that holding down my 9-5 as well has become untenable; that's the main motivation for this change. I don't intend to take another full time job, although I don't have a lot of paying work lined up so please bear in mind that I am looking for some ;)

Things I would like to be doing:

Working with development teams on skills, tools and process (think teach a man to fish, rather than sell him a fish)

API development

Technical writing

Meeting cool and interesting people and embarking on cool and interesting projects together

Advice on achieving any or all of the above is appreciated - if any of you can also think of me when discussing business, write me a linked in recommendation, or retweet my announcement of my news, that would be fabulous!!

If you're still reading, then I'll share a little something with you. I decided that with a career move, I needed a little rebrand, so here is my new angel avatar. I hope you like her :)

Wish me luck in my new (ad)venture, I'll be keeping everyone up to date as always!