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!
tekx Day 3
Day 3 of tekx started with a presentation of developer trends by Matthew Schmidt from DZone. I had met Matthew on the second night here at the Adobe party and we discovered that we were both from the Raleigh area. Always great to meet new PHPers from the Triangle. His magazine is like a digg for developers, so his talk was about what trends he saw over the past year. The most interesting thing that I heard was that users who are migrating to Chrome are doing so at Firefox’s expense and not IE’s. I guess we are all looking for a better, less resource intensive browser. I too have decided to give Chrome the ol’ college try, so we’ll see how that goes.
The rest of the days talks went like this:
- I checked out Matthew Turland’s talk on the new SPL Features in PHP 5.3. Turns out, PHP is getting all grown up with real live data structures like linked lists and heaps. Neato for the Computer Science geek that dwells within me.
- Next was Nate Abele and Joël Perras’s talk about Lithium. Joël and I talked a bit about Lithium earlier in the conference, and it sounded neat. They skated the line of sarcasm with lines like “All Frameworks Suck” a little too much, and I honestly think their message got lost. I still wanna check it out, but the presentation would not have sold me on it had it not been for talking with Joël offline.
- Next was Measuring Your Code, again with Nate Abele. It was a pretty interesting talk about gathering metrics about your code, but it wasn’t a whole lot of new info for me.
After these sessions, I was feeling kinda drained so I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Hack Track hacking on Zend Framework. Today and tomorrow are bug hunt days, so I figured I would give a shot at fixing some bugs. In actuality, the network was so darn slow that I didn’t get a chance to actually fix anything, but I did download and install lithium and got a project stood up with it and Mongo DB very quickly.
During the Hack Track, I had some good conversation with a bunch of folks about PHP, community, contributing to open source, and all sorts of stuff. There are some really awesome people that come to these conferences and they are always willing to help out. Good times.
Dinner was on our own, so I made the trek to PF Changs, which is becoming a tradition any time I go to a conference. After dinner, Microsoft sponsored a gaming night where “Jason and the Thundercats” made our world debut on the Rock Band stage. “American Woman” never sounded so sweet.
I didn’t stay at the part long as I wanted to rehearse and tweak my slides for my presentation that I had to give the next day. I had to go downstairs because the internet in my room sucked, which led to me catching up with some more folks and having more good conversation over a beer. I freakin love this conference...
Futureweb2010 Day 2
Day 2 at Futureweb 2010 brought some interesting sessions and some less-than-interesting sessions as well. Here's my wrap-up.
The opening keynote was from Danah Boyd, who is an expert at looking at analytics with respect to social media. Her talk was jam packed with interesting information, but the part that spoke to me was the escalation of Facebook and what that has meant to privacy. When Facebook started (and when I joined) it was limited to .edu email addresses, which meant that the users were entirely academic. Academia has a much different level of trust with one another than the general public, and Facebook got a reputation early on as being a viable alternative to MySpace...MySpace without the kooks 
As Facebook grew up, they got much looser with the data that they possess. First with Beacon, then with Facebook connect, and most recently with Facebook Graph. They have gone from trusted source, to a company that seems willing to distribute data about you to every single website that wants it. During the talk, I posted this tweet:
Now I have always known the risks of giving my data to Facebook. I'm not one of the people Danah talked about who don't know what the privacy policies are or just click though the alerts and not reading them. I'm an informed user and I (think I) know what Facebook is doing with my info. But there most recent moves to allow my friends to share data about me without my say so is frightening. So much so, that I am considering removing my account totally. We'll see how that goes...another blog post is probably forthcoming about that.
The other session that I found extremely interesting was one on entrepreneurship. This is a topic that hits close to home for me, as I am working on my third startup right now. There was so much awesome advice that came from this, but I'm going to focus on a few key points. The first point, was that staying in the black and making money early will save you from mistakes and heartache later on. This was in reference to seeking VC money for your startup. It really does make a LOT of sense to me. I mean, if your idea takes off and you aren't making any money, you could put yourself in a situation where you HAVE to have a million dollars+ of funding just to continue your work. If you don't have that money, you have to essentially sell your company to VC funding groups to stay above water. VC's usually want about 75-80% of your company, which before you know it, you have lost control of your company and are now subject to the whims of your financial backers. Not a great move. The other thing I heard in the talk was a quote..."The defining mark of an entrepreneur is that they are people who get things done". Damn straight. I couldn't have said it better myself, and it's about as true as it comes.
The other sessions for the day were lacking. I went to an intellectual property discussion and a discussion on interactive design, neither of which spoke to me at all. I felt as though the speakers were more interested in hearing themselves talk than conveying useful information. I'm sure somebody somewhere got something out of it, but I thought they were unprepared and uninteresting.
I'll be back for the third and final day tomorrow.
Futureweb2010 Day 1
As is tradition, I will be blogging about my experience at the Futureweb2010 conference which is held here in Raleigh.
First off, Futureweb is a "lite" version of the real conference, so we don't get to hear all the normal talks, but we get to be present for the keynotes and a few other really interesting interview-style sessions. Here's what the first day of Futureweb2010 was like.
First off, I had no idea how big this conference (www2010) really was. It is a global conference with over 48 countries represented. Last year it was in Spain. Go Raleigh! Way to land one of those big, tech conferences!
This was my first experience in the new Raleigh Convention Center as well. It is really a very nice venue. Large, airy spaces with lots of natural light. A great place to hold such a prestigious conference. I was truly impressed by the venue.
The conference started with a keynote from Vint Cerf, who is one of the fathers of the internet. After being introduced by someone, who was introduced by someone else, who was introduced by yet another person, he finally hopped (although almost fell) on stage and the show started. His keynote was mostly focused on the challenges that the next generation of the internet will bring. Security, routing, infrastructure. Lots of things that, as a developer, I need, but don't really care about. It was an interesting talk though.
The next was a panel on the openness of government and the sharing of data. It was a panel with Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the internet) and a few other folks representing the UK government, US government and the US Archives. This is a topic that hits near and dear to my heart, as I work in state government. The focus was on making government more transparent by providing access to data that once was locked away in small, dark places. I found it incredibly interesting and inspiring. I immediately made the following tweet:
...which I plan on trying to make happen here at state.
The afternoon sessions were additional interviews with Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. Both guys are very good speakers and extremely interesting (I mean, Vint Cerf just knows Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Who does that? Crazy...) Both of them are so far above the rest of us in their theory and understanding of the internet that it is intimidating. Crazy smart dudes.
A slight not to those who are organizing. Hour and a half sessions are way way way too long. In my opinion, one hour should be the max session time with 45 minutes being ideal. Those marathon sessions wore me out and I thought they could have been condensed with the same information conveyed.
Anyway, that's it for day one. I'll be around for the rest of the week so if you are attending, find me and say hello.
Futureweb 2010 at WWW2010
This week, I will be attending the Futureweb conference, which is a sub-conference of WWW2010...held right here in good ol' Raleigh. The topics are all set around looking forward to what the web will bring us in the coming years. Should be interesting...
There are some great speakers lined up like Vint Cert and Tim Berners-Lee. I'm probably more excited to spend some quality time networking and meeting other folks in the development community (my favorite part of any conference).
Anyone else going? If so, hit me up and we can grab a drink or something.
Speaking at TEK·X
I had announced this on my twitter feed, but I thought it warranted a blog post of it's own. I have been asked to speak at TEK·X, an awesome conference for PHP professionals. My talk, "Lean Mean PHP Machine" was accepted! Flippin sweet! Here is the description of my talk:
Implementing software development “best practices” can be a challenging feat, especially if you are in a very small team of developers. Little to no budget, stress to just “get something out”, and lack of understanding from management of what you really do means you have to make sacrifices, right? This talk will give you some insight on accomplishing your goals of being a top-rated development shop, even if you are an army of one. From justifying those best practices to utilizing free services to hiring additional help, this talk will run the gamut of running a software development shop at a small scale.
Speaking at a conference is a great responsibility and honor, but then I took at look at who the other speakers are and I was immediately humbled. So many of the other speakers are the movers and shakers in the PHP community. Hell, some of them actually helped write PHP. As soon as I saw the speaker list, I instantly got nervous. But a few reassuring words from my friend Keith Casey helped. I am just thankful that people like Keith and the rest of the TEK·X organizers are willing to give me a shot to share what I have learned about working with PHP in a resource starved environment.
So if you are a PHP pro and want to get involved with a great community, consider coming to TEK·X in May. Knowing (of) most of the speakers, and meeting most all of them at one time or another, I can GUARANTEE that you are going to get your moneys worth.
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