December 11, 2009
Posted in Events at 4:15 pm by ElizabethN
PHPWomen is proud to support the efforts of GirlsinTech and NYPHP in bringing holiday cheer to all those in the tech community by bringing them together (men and women alike). If you’re in the New York City area, we encourage you to participate in the 3rd annual New York’s Technical Community Holiday Party.
Come rub elbows with technology’s finest, as we unite diverse skills and interests, recognized industry professionals, IT managers, authors, speakers, and the business community that we’re all a part of.
Business casual attire is required.
Space is limited – RSVP is mandatory
The party is on December 21 at 7pm. For location information and more details, please visit http://www.bootup.io/holiday-party/.
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December 1, 2009
Posted in News at 10:01 am by lornajane
The rumours have been flying around for a while, and we even dropped some hints; since its December it is time for us to confirm that there is a PHPWomen Calendar available for 2010, and it is now on sale. It features our charter members dressed as the beautiful women they are, with a guest appearance by our booth babes.
The calendars are available to buy on Zazzle, and can be ordered in a selection of sizes (Zazzle have local domains around the world; check where to ship yours from). 10% of every purchase goes to PHPWomen to enable us to use those funds to support the group and our members next year. Our gracious thanks go to our friend and booth babe Derick Rethans, who photographed us so beautifully (despite our diva moments!) and created the calendar products for you to buy – Derick, you rock 
So – go forth and purchase! Surely there’s someone in your life who needs this calendar! Or maybe you’d like one for yourself …?
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September 22, 2009
Posted in News at 11:54 am by lornajane
PHPWomen is expanding its IRC presence with a new channel – and this one is just for the ladies. Our existing channel #phpwomen remains open to all but we’re adding a little space for the women to get
together without the men if they want to. This channel has a password – pop in to #phpwomen on freenode, introduce yourself and request access details if you want to join in!
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August 9, 2009
Posted in News at 1:18 pm by ElizabethN
We’re happy to announce that we are making variations of our PHPWomen t-shirts for sale! Now those of you who couldn’t make it to the conferences can get a PHPW shirt for every day of the week.
We have two places where you can buy your PHPWomen shirt:
US/Canada: http://phpwomen.spreadshirt.com
Europe: http://phpwomen.spreadshirt.net
For everyone else, you’ll likely have to see which shop can give you the best rate on shipping.
The shops are operated separately, so you’ll see a difference in the products we’re offering in each. We’ll be expanding our offering in the next few months, though, so keep an eye on us.
If you have any questions or comments about the shirts, by all means, let me know at elizabeth-at-naramore-dot-net.
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July 16, 2009
Posted in Events, Members at 1:49 am by lornajane
One of our regular members, Kana Yeh, attended DPC this year and wrote about her experiences there:
This is the 3rd PHP conference I been to within a year; that is quite a lot for me! First the PHP conference in Apeldoorn by Eduvision, then PHP UK 2009 in London. Thanks to PHPwomen I could attend the most recent one: DPC09 by Ibuildings in Amsterdam.
Being in London for only 4 months and working at Touchnote seems short but it was nice to be back in Holland for a few days. I do miss Holland a bit and all the things I can’t get my hands on in London like: Hollandse drop (Dutch Liquorice candy), Hollandse nieuwe (Salted herring), frikandel speciaal and a broodje kroket. 7 more months to go and I will be able to have all of that again! and then it is my turn to miss the wonderful things in London
The PHP conference added more sweetness to my short stay in Holland. PHP or web related conferences are mental energy boosters for me. It is very motivating to absorb the new or more in depth information and to learn more and more. I seem not to be able to get enough of it.
But, what to do if there are multiple tracks with interesting talks at the same time?…panic? I didn’t know what to do. With agony I had to sacrifice the one for the other. How do you deal with multiple talks at the same time that you both don’t want to miss?
Here is a recap of a few talks that I attended and found interesting.
An intermediate talk about Caching for Performance
by Rob Allen
Do not try to get data more than once. First measure performance, how fast/slow your website is, using software like Siege. Do not guess what is slowing down your site, instead use a profiler to find out what is going on, for example: xdebug and Webgrind (http://code.google.com/p/webgrind/): What you’ll be looking for is:
- unexpected function calls
- functions called too often
- functions take too long to return result
Types of caching in order, from fast to fastest are database, filesystem or memory (i.e. memcached, Zend_Cache). Examples of when to use caching:
- names of countries doesn’t change often (if at all), use a cached version.
- a news page, update cache when a new article is added
Another way is browser level caching. This is not forcible but it is possible to provide the hint and ask browser to cache it. Get browser to cache files that are called constantly like css, js and images that are on every page. This is ideal if visitor visits many of our pages.
State & Ajax – How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World
by Paul Reinheimer
- The ‘back’ button is not ours to take! Give back to the visitors.
- Ajax requests sent have no guarantee to come back in the same order. To solve this, queue the requests. It might be slower, but it is reliable.
- One reason why visitors abandon shopping cards is because they are frustrated by the shopping experience. They give up and try somewhere else. This is easy because of the low barrier: type in an other address in address-bar. To keep your visiting shopers focus on user experience.
- User experience is the new brand! “Websites that continuously provide excellent user experiences are more likely to be visited, re-visited, shared, and praised”. Provide an experience that works exactly like it should work. For the developer it sounds like a lot of extra work. But that is 10% more work for me for 30% less effort for every user who will every use the site.
Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications
by Eli White
- Performance = speed or rendering
- Scaling = web app that works with current and future load of new level of traffic
- Don’t write code that is meant for 1 server only.
- Use Master/Slave replication. This way you have a backup if 1 machine dies
- Isolate load on the server is a crucial aspect of scaling. CUD on master and R from the slave
- Avoid slave lag! Especially with lots of traffic and CRUDS at once.
- Partitioning: Break database in smaller ones.
- Vertical, horizontal or application level partitioning
- Cache small pieces of data that can be reused often, eg: friends stories
The conference was well organized with over 300 attendees. Not only were most talks of great interest to me but the breaks, the lunch and the atmosphere was great. The times in between talks everyone seemed to be networking and meeting new interesting people. I too met interesting new people who you see around on the internet! It was also great to see the guys and girls again who I met before at PHP chatrooms on Freenode and other conferences/events.I also had the chance to promote Touchnote postcards. Giving everyone who attended DPC09 a free Touchnote postcard to send to anyone, anywhere they wanted! Thank you Cal Evans for the nice intro in the opening of the last day. I hope everyone sent a Touchnote card to their friends or family. If not: Do it! (you have the code)..
A pat on the back for the Ibuildings’s organizing team and sponsors. I hope to see you next year with more in depth topics.
Thanks Kana! Were you at the event? Got something to share about your experience? Add a comment!
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June 3, 2009
Posted in Interviews, Members at 4:19 am by lornajane
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!
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April 24, 2009
Posted in Members, News at 9:45 pm by KathyReid
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!
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April 4, 2009
Posted in Events, News at 9:17 am by KathyReid
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.
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March 12, 2009
Posted in Events at 4:22 am by lornajane
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.
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March 6, 2009
Posted in News at 8:59 am by loonytoons
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!
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