Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

tekx Day Final

The last day of tekx and guess who has the first session today....me and my "Lean Mean PHP Machine!"  I have presented at quite a few conferences over the years, but never anything as big as tekx and never at a PHP conference. There were people in the audience who I have the utmost respect for. I feel like tekx took a chance on me, being a new speaker. The room was (WTF!) STANDING ROOM ONLY! You would think the pressure would be on but honestly, I wasn’t nervous a bit.

It went better than I expected. There was a lot of good discussion during my slides, which I love. Lots of presenters don’t like to be interrupted, but I always like to see my talks as discussions rather than lectures. Some good questions and points were raised, and I guess you could say I spouted off a few good lines that got tweeted and re-tweeted a bunch (I swear I didn’t plan any of them).

Stuff like that cracks me up.  I hope everyone enjoyed it cause I sure enjoyed giving it.

I got good feedback after the talk and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I thanked Cal Evans, Keith Casey and Marco Tabini for giving me the opportunity to give a talk and believing that I could do it. That means a whole lot to me...thanks guys!

The next session I went to was Lorna Jane Mitchell’s talk about open sourcing your career. She talked about how her efforts in the open source community outside of her job had benefited her career path. She started out doing the things that I have been doing over the past few years. Going to conferences, connecting in with projects, contributing where she could, meeting people. I already feel like that is making a difference in my career, and I actually really like all of that stuff to, so it was a good talk.

The last talk of the day was a panel session of the state of the PHP Community. I only got to stay for about half of it because I had to pack, but there was a bunch of good info there for people trying to start user groups. One of the things I am going to take from this conference is that I need to make a better effort to encourage the PHPers in Raleigh to unite a little better. I have plans...bwahahah!

So that’s it for tekx! The conference was great, and catching up with people is always a good thing. I learned a lot and am a bit recharged. Thanks to all the sponsors and organizers for a great conference. Hope I see you guys next year!