Strength in Unity
At the recent php|tek conference, Brian Gorbett took the time to interview some of the phpwomen. You can see Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon, joined later by Ligaya Turmelle, interviewed about themselves and the group at http://vimeo.com/4835705. If you like this video or want to join in the dicussion, leave a comment!
You can now follow PHPWomen on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/PHPWomen or by using @PHPWomen. We’re also using the #phpwomen hashtag if you’d like to flag a Tweet as of interest to our followers 
Happy Tweeting!
Many of us in the PHP community have attended BarCampus - informal, unorganised gatherings of like-minded folk, dedicated to sharing information, exploring new technology and forging relationships. BarCamps tend to be held in urban areas and capital cities, with easy access to space, wireless internet etc. This struck the founder of BarCampMelbourne, Ben Balbo, as a contradiction. BarCamps are open, transparent events, which encourage participation from people of all technical abilities. Barriers to participation are reduced as much as possible - with entry fees kept low and sponsors brought on board to help bear costs. However, those who live in rural areas often face different hurdles to participating in BarCamps, and IT in general - such as poor access to internet services (particularly broadband), fewer people to network and share with, and less access to hardware and software.
From this situation was born the idea of StixCamp - a BarCamp held in a rural area. The very first StixCamp was held in Newstead, Central Victoria, Australia on 14th-15th March and saw a number of seasoned presenters share their areas of expertise with the nearly 50 attendees. The presentations included;
The post event survey indicated that StixCampNewstead was a roaring success, in no small part due to the generous support of sponsors, in particular Multimedia Victoria.
This came up on the forums a while ago but this year’s Ada Lovelace Day is very soon, on March 24th. As a celebration of women in technology, there’s a pledge running - where you pledge to publish something on that day about a woman you admire in science or technology.
There are a few of us signed up already, and I hope others will join us too. So that we can share in the excitement, please post a comment here with a link to your post - so we can all read around one another’s and learn about more inspiring women.
For anyone thinking that PHP conferences are full of dry technically laborious talks attended by rows and rows of pasty sun-starved bespectacled boys, thus making them a completely unapproachable unappealing yawn-fest then I’d say think again!
PHP UK Conference 09 is the second conference that I’ve attended (PHPNW08 in Manchester being the first) and at both events I’ve learned a lot and had a thoroughly good time!
Now I’m not your typical technical conference goer at all. In fact I’m fairly shy, don’t like crowds (prefer to hide in corners), and am convinced that I don’t know anything and that I’m wildly under-qualified to even consider going to these events. Obviously I’m wrong about at least half of that but with only 15 months experience in a discipline that I arrived into via the most convoluted route, there’s bound to be the odd paranoia that I’ll somehow get found out as an imposter and laughed out the room. Surely such an eminent group of knowledgeable people would have little time for someone as inexperienced as me, and how was I ever going to follow any of the talks without suffering some kind of brain meltdown mid talk?
Well I’m very pleased to say that I was wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not have been more wrong! Luckily this time I was ableto attend both the pre and post conference socials that gave me the chance to really get to know the people and the faces (a nice change from the forums or irc) and to even have a chat with the speakers, who are actually extremely approachable, friendly people always happy to answer questions or receive feedback or offer advice and support to anybody (even little old me!). Thanks must go to Rob, Tess and Kat for arranging to meet for food before the Thursday social as otherwise the prospect of arriving alone in the dark at a random London bar full of strangers was a little daunting! Come the Friday social though I felt like I had a whole new group of friends and was quite happy to over-indulge on the wine and chatter away like an idiot to anyone in earshot (apologies if you were an unwitting recipient of this).
As for the conference talks themselves, I enjoyed all the ones I attended and more importantly, was pleasantly surprised to find that I could follow the majority of the technical content. While a few did cover subjects that I may well never have the need or desire to implement, Sharding Architectures by David Soria Parra for example (although you never know), I could still understand the concepts behind the subject and the reasons as to why you might need to introduce such a thing, which was really great and shows that the speakers don’t set out to unnecessarily blind you with science! I’m not going to go into much detail about the talks themselves, the videos will be up soon so you can judge for yourself, but I’ll just quickly mention the ones that I did manage to see.
In addition to David’s, another talk which may or may not prove useful for me in the future was Flex and AIR for PHP programmers by Mihai Corlan. This was a topic that I didn’t know too much about so thought that I should go and check it out and while I don’t think that I shall be leaping into that straight away (too much other stuff to learn first) it’s certainly something to file away for future use. Weirdly at the same time that Mihai was indulging himself with a few demonstrations of Desktop Keeley, Stefan Koopmanschap was also apparently indulging himself, somehow working cleavage into his otherwise informative and well-balanced Myphp-busters: symfony framework talk.
Sebastian Bergmann’s talk Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits gave an interesting introduction on these new upcoming features, which was a bit of a follow on from Scott MacVicar’s talk on What’s new in PHP 5.3 (for those who saw it). Sebastian was a very knowledgeable and interesting speaker, although it was a little hard to believe him when he saying how excited he was about these new features (something to do with his completely deadpan expression) but it was very well presented and easy to follow. A little bit more about the practical applications of when I might want to use these features would have been helpful but it was a good introduction to the concepts and syntax involved.
Stuart Herbert’s talk on Living with Frameworks was a look at his company’s experience of implementing the Symfony framework and issues surrounding this including migrating legacy code, staff training, enforcing stricter coding practices and justifying the ‘better code but longer to implement’ balance to management. It was a good, well presented talk, though I think I would have preferred a greater emphasis on some of the technical practicalities of implementing a new framework rather than such a focus on the individual thoughts of each his employees on the whole process.
One of my favourite talks was undoubtedly Chris Shiflett’s talk on Security-Centered Design - exploring the impact of human behaviour. Chris isa great speaker, the talk was very engaging (had very lovely slides - nice work, whoever designed those) and was interestingly focused less ontechnical solutions and more on the user’s experience and unwitting psychological response to websites and their error messages and security features. With some videos mixed in this was a very thought provoking talk which was right up my street as I find psychology and people’s unconscious responses and reactions fascinating. A great way to round off the talks, thanks Chris!
Finally, and I don’t know why I’m mentioning this last, but my other favourite talk was Aral Balkan’s The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades keynote talk. It might have seemed a slightly controversial decision, getting a flash developer to give the keynote at a PHP conference, but any doubts anyone might have had about that didn’t last long. It was great to have someone so dynamic and enthusiastic to start off the day, to inspire us to keep working, to keep things fresh and interesting, and to remind us that we do this every day for the pure and simple reason that we love it. It was an inspiring talk just perfect for firing us up and priming us for a day of learning, questioning and networking.
Other talks that I should mention and heard great things about but unfortunately didn’t get to see myself included David Axmark’s Clouds on the horizon? Get ready for Drizzle, Hank Janssen’s PHP on Windows - the undiscovered country and Rowan Merewood’sState Machines to State Of The Art: Smart, efficient design using ReST & MVC.
That’s all about the talks. Look out for the videos though, they should be getting posted soon!
Between talks there was time to network, socialise and visit the many stands setup by sponsors and other organisations including, of course, the PHP women stand which was well represented and where you could pick up badges, moo cards and even chocolates (if you went at the right time). There were also Xboxes and Wii’s to play, discounted books on sale, demonstrations of software and new products, recruiters to talk to, the list goes on! In fact I didn’t quite manage to fit it all in, highlighted by the fact that I foolishly missed out on the chocolates at the Ibuildings stand, and apparently Sebastian Bergmann also had cake?? Oh well…
So to anyone who’s never thought of going to a conference before, or who hasn’t yet plucked up the courage then I really encourage you to go! If you work on your own or in a team they are a great opportunity to meet new people, get new ideas, get help and advice and get a look into some of the exciting things that are happening out there at the moment. If someone like me can go and have such a good time and get so much out of it then I really can’t think of any excuse for anyone else not to go too!
Thanks to everybody for making it such a great day!
We’re delighted to announce the winner of our “I am” competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence “I am a PHPWoman because …”. The winning entry comes from rowd:
I am a PHPWomen member because…
I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means.
That includes men and women, anyone who has an open mind and open eyes.
Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums. Many thanks to all who entered, it was great to hear your stories!
If you happen to be in Jacksonville, Florida on March 9th be sure to drop in and see us at the Florida Linux Show. We should have a small booth set up to sit and chat about whatever you wish.
PHPWomen is delighted to announce the arrival of a new competition here at phpwomen.org. To win, all you have to do is complete this sentence: ”I am a phpwomen member because …” and tell us how you got to where you are today and what brings you to the site. You should put your entry into the forum thread before the end of February.
The usual rules apply - women, men, aliens and pets are all welcome to enter the competition, we will delete any post we think doesn’t meet the spirit of the competition, and the winners will be selected in an entirely informal manner. The prize is glory and a $50 gift certificate for php|architect!
Just wanted to bring everyone up to date on some things that are happening with PHPWomen
1) the site is currently being housed on a temporary server as we get ready to move it over to new hosting. A big thanks to Cal for hosting us the past 2 years! Because of it being on a temporary server, you may notice problems with the forums and/or links. We know of these are will be working to fix things up when we go to our next host.
2) PHPWomen.org is now a not-for-profit incorporation in the state of Florida. I have a couple of other things left to do (like get a tax id for us) but after that I hope to file for a 501(3)(c) tax exempt charity. This will more then likely to take quite a while to get - but we are at least on the road to it.
3) Various volunteers are currently trying to pick the top 3 photos for elephpant world tour. It is a hard choice and I do not envy them the choice.
PHPWomen are featured in the December issue of the php|architect magazine, we’re the subject of this month’s /etc column! If you aren’t already a subscriber - then go and check out the options, they even have a free issue offer so there are no excuses
