LornaJane

So, at the Dutch PHP Conference, they were making a video and they interviewed me. The video is at http://www.bachelor-ict.nl/dpc and it is also featured in this article on DevZone which is exciting! The video is mostly about the PHPWomen organisation, rather than my talk but it does have some footage of me speaking and of the conference itself.

There's an article competition running over at phpwomen.org where thre are two Zend Studio for Eclipse licenses to give away to the best short articles submitted in the Best Practices forum before the end of July. See the announcement for more details.

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!

Well, its a misleading title because the day is only half over but the Dutch PHP Conference 2008 is well and truly underway! Today I've been in the Zend Framework tutorial given by Matthew Weir O'Phinney, which is a full-day session. Its been excellent - with some concepts, some examples, and now a real working application to take a look around and learn from. I've had to work with ZF a little bit lately and I wish I'd been able to have this tutorial before I did that!

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!

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.