February 23, 2008

BarCampMelbourne2008 rundown

Posted in News, php at 9:13 pm by KathyReid

BarCampMelbourne2008 was, simply put, AWESOME!

BarCampMelbourne2008 was held at Thoughtworks [wikipedia] at 155 Queen Street, Melbourne on 23 Feb 08, and had approximately 60 in attendance. Key observations from the day included:

  • The vast majority of attendees were male, with myself and only one other female attendee
  • It was surprising to note the large number of presenters with Apple laptops. The attendees were largely from the FOSS community, and the popularity of the MacBook was interesting. This will be a trend to keep an eye on as the iPhone is released (and is likely to integrate well with other Apple offerings)
  • The average age of the attendees was higher than I expected, with the majority in the 25-35 age range (I was expecting a a younger crowd). However, this meant that we had a number of seasoned professionals presenting.

My talk was on Deakin University’s use of PHP over the last 8 years and showed how our practices and use of PHP had matured over that time, and what challenges still lie ahead for us.

Other notable presentations included:

  • An introduction to the APhpLix (pronounced “app-licks”) development framework, which is based on PHP and Javascript. The presenter, flame, was able to development a web application in around 45 seconds (no kidding!) using an existing data source. My only concern was the lack of accessibility (WCAG) compliance shown by the finished app.
  • Jason King presented advice on why donating your technical skills to not for profit organisations can be so rewarding, and gave us tips on how to set appropriate boundaries.
  • Ben Cornwell showed us all how PHP Under Control can be used to ‘build’ PHP packages, similar to compiled languages. This helps to prevent SVN/CVS commits breaking a package, and provides a good change management model. PHP Under Control uses Cruise Control.

Finally, last but not least, a very big thank you to Ben Balbo for organising the whole event, and making it such a success.

February 5, 2008

PHPWomen and DevChix

Posted in News, php at 4:13 pm by lig

devchix logoI am pleased and proud to announce that PHPWomen and DevChix have formed an alliance with each other that will hopefully help to strengthen both sites and their communities by providing mutual support. Working together we will hopefully be able to do much more then we would do apart.

I recently met with one of the founders of DevChix (Desi McAdam) for dinner and conversation. There we talked about our organizations and histories finding we had a huge number of things in common - from talks with others that led to our earliest beginnings to our shared workings to become a 501c3 tax exempt charity and our shared hope to help women come and be active in their respective coding communities. I had a wonderful time and want to thank Desi for taking the time out of her very busy schedule to meet and talk with me.

We at PHPWomen eagerly look forward to working with DevChix and are excited at what we can do together in the future.