LornaJane

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!

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:



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!

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!

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!

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 :)

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 :)