LornaJane

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.

Last night I attended and spoke at the First Sheffield Geekup held at the Fat Cat in Sheffield. My talk was entitled "Deploying Web Projects with Subversion" and you can see the slides for that at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/deploying-web-projects-with-svn/.

Overall I think the event was well-organised, there were certainly plenty of people there and we had a projector, speakers and a room so it pretty much ticked all the boxes. The Fat Cat is a nice pub, with good beer, but for those of us coming from further afield it was a bit tricky to get to as its not exactly handy for the station. The evening was good however I felt that the timings slipped badly - I was the first speaker and although there was somthing else happening earlier on, the talks aimed for 7:30 were actually nearer 9pm ... so a couple of pints later than I was expecting my audience to be and I think my talk came across as rather dry as a result! Also since one of the speakers ran over his time completely (now I understand why other geekups sit with a stopwatch and click the slides through for you!), I had about ten minutes after the talks to hand out a couple of business cards and answer a few quick questions before I had to dash off for my train. All of these though are only teething problems and I think everyone had a pretty good time, so well done to Jag for getting it off the ground ... here's to next month!

I was very pleased to hear that Sheffield is getting its own Geekup event, and that it starts next week on 7th May and will run on the first Wednesday of every month. I was even more pleased to be asked to speak at it - I'll be giving a 20:20 format (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide = 6 and a half minutes) on "Deploying Web Projects with Subversion". Come along to The Fat Cat on Alma Street at 6pm for lots of fun, beer, and chatter!

I did mention recently that I had arranged to speak at the local GeekUp group. Well, the event itself was last night and although I did have speaking nerves I think it went OK.

I've uploaded the slides I used to Slideshare, so you can find them here. The talk was entirely based on a talk Ivo Jansch gave at the PHP London conference in February.

I'm trying to work on my speaking skills as I've been asked to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference this summer, if you were there and have any comments then let me know! Thanks also to everyone who did come and say hi and give me feedback on the night :)

Edit: I see there is photographic evidence - thanks Deb and Nigel!

This week I will be giving a 20:20 talk at the GeekUp event in Leeds, entitled "Enterprise Web Development". The 20:20 talk format allows talks with 20 slides, with 20 seconds allowed for each slide. Wish me luck :)

If you're local to Leeds, I'd love to see you there.