July 2, 2008
Posted in News at 11:21 am by lornajane
The article contest running on PHPWomen.org through July just got more exciting. We have asked people to post entries to our Best Practices forum. The authors of the best two entries will win copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse. We’re happy to announce that in addition to this the two winners will also each receive a 1-year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and the opportunity to have their submission featured on the Linux Pro site at http://www.linuxpromagazine.com. We’re delighted to have this opportunity to be involved with Linux Pro magazine. Good luck to all entrants - get writing so you don’t run out of time!
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June 24, 2008
Posted in News at 4:57 am by lornajane
We are pleased to announce a competition here on the phpwomen.org site! As our regular users will know, most of our content is on our forums - and its here that the competition will run.
To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding - here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven’t thought of. You will need to register in order to post on the forums; you can post a short article on any topic you like, and post as many entries as you like. Anything offensive, lame, irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate will be removed by our moderators.
At the end of July we will pick the best two submissions and the authors will each receive a Zend Studio for Eclipse perpetual license as their prize. We would like to thank Zend for generously donating the prizes for this competition, thanks guys!
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June 19, 2008
Posted in News at 7:53 am by lornajane
Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica’s account of her day:
The Dutch PHP Conference, Amsterdam, June 14th, 2008
A prime example of Women’s Strength in Unity can be found in Athens: six Caryatids holding the roof of the Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis. That is where I took my PHP elephant to be photographed to fulfill my obligation for receiving one. I was yelled and whistled away few times trying to take the picture because it was apparently forbidden to put the elephant down anywhere, not even on a fence.
In the Greek sun Amsterdam sees far away two days later. What is it that survived this distance in my memory from the PHP conference? First of all, the relaxed atmosphere and the feeling that being one of the very few women did not matter.
PHPWomen.org had a great presence at the conference and the number of T-shirts worn was growing steadily during the day.
To my surprise, most speakers acted as if PHP still had to prove itself to the world. Sneering at Twitter and Ruby-on-Rails was the favorite sport of the day. Because unsuitable design for the task can be done in any language, the PHP community is just fortunate that it was not PHP that was used, otherwise PHP would have been laughed a just as much. At similar Java events, this type of discussion seems past, in favor of discussions about design patterns, frameworks etc.
Zeev Suraski
Of course I knew that Rasmus Lerdorf first developed PHP, and that Zeev gave the first two letters of his first name to Zend, but I did not know the details of PHP history he was telling: the real PHP resulted from a student project. Now I know.
It is always interesting to see people on stage who made a definite mark on the computing landscape and Zeev is certainly one of them.
Zeev was also talking about development trends: Simplicity makes a comeback. The opposite of simplicity seems to be J2EE (more speakers were referring to J2EE as an example of ways you can torture developers). He quoted that PHP was the second most popular project in Eclipse. His examples of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) are Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg. He said that PHP is currently not well equipped to develop RIA’s. Zend is partnering with Dojo, a well known Ajax toolkit, therefore this may change soon. The thing to watch according to Zeev is cloud computing, which I understand to be a mixture of SOA and dashboards.
Software and the taste of mayo, Marco Tabini, publisher php|architect
Twenty years ago, I used to do that: making mayo from olive oil, eggs and lemon juice. These days you are not supposed to eat raw eggs because you risk a salmonella infection. After hearing today what commercial mayo contains, I may reconsider 
Further, I know now that PHP cannot be used to calculate the first 100 million prime numbers and that you can write bad code in any language.
Marco said that you should think big at design, choose the right tools and scale everything, always. And with lots of hand-waving statistics he made plausible that there is a range of characteristics for a site: adsense, add driven, subscription or e-commerce – where there is also a range of page clicks you need, to become profitable. The cost per page click should be in-line with this. I still do not know what Mayo is.
eZ components, Derick Rethans
This was an overview of eZ Components. What I got out of this talk is that I should look into this framework. Derick was stressing that their persistence strategy is not derived from the active record pattern, like Rails (Twitter…), but from Hibernate (a Java persistence framework).
PHP Deployment with Subversion, Lorna Jane Mitchell
This was a very clear overview of what you can and should do with Subversion. As a daily user of Subversion, I knew the concepts, but it was useful to hear advice about making deployment plans and rollback plans, preferably automated. I realized that I did not consider DB versioning for a project I am working on, where I maybe should have done so. And there was more useful advice, such as reference to practical deployment tools.
I liked to see a real Nabaztag! Can’t they talk also? I knew about them, because of a volunteer project where they are using them in children’s hospitals to let parents communicate via the internet.
PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 – A look ahead, Stefan Priebsch
What is going to be new in PHP 5.3 and PHP 6?
Unicode
Garbage Collection
SPL improvements: double linked list, stack, queue, priority queue
Namespaces: with lots of discussion, Stefan didi not seem to like the current plans.
something about magic calls and about late static binding.
ereg will be deprecate in favor of preg
SQLite3
There was a lively discussion because there were some people in the room that were closely involved with PHP development.
The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Internet Architecture, Terry Chay
We were warned that we would get fireworks, and indeed we got fireworks. The essence of what he was saying was about the pyramid-like layers that internet sites have and that you should observe when developing a site: start with stability and look at security lst.
make it rich security
make it fast speed
keep it running scale
make it work stability
Sound advice. The movie snippets Terry used were funny. The language he used was not.
After the last talk there was a reception and we all received a PHP Conference T-shirt. I ran away to catch my plane, my suitcase heavier with two books: PHP design patterns and PHP security, very useful. And my head full with interesting PHP impressions. Thanks PHP Women, for inviting me!
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June 16, 2008
Posted in News at 5:11 am by lornajane
At the weekend there was the Dutch PHP Conference, at which phpwomen were able to have a stand. Out of 370 or so attendees we counted 8 women, which is a very low ratio indeed, lower than any other event I’ve seen so far. I had taken 50 t-shirts to give away, but in contrast to other events where we are very popular and we run out of shirts quite quickly, I actually have some left which perhaps illustrates the different attitudes in different geographical areas. We did get quite a few visitors to our stand though, helped by the fact that we had three fabulous booth babes hanging out with us. Huge thanks go to Marco Tabini, Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Ivo Jansch for helping us out with this - all three were either speaking, running the conference, or doing both so we really appreciate the time they took to help us out.
The conference itself was a great success and enjoyed by all - we’ll have a write-up of the day to add here soon. I’d also like to thank Marion and Juliette for helping on the stand and all the guys who dropped by and offered their support too. Hopefully next year there will be a few more women attending!
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April 18, 2008
Posted in News at 7:56 pm by lig
What is there to say… Day 2 was another hectic day filled with “womaning” the PHPWomen’s booth and attending a number of sessions (INFORMATION_SCHEMA tour, Performance under a Microscope - the Tobias and Jay show, Benchmark and Monitoring Tools (P1), and Deadlocks). Again met a number of wonderful attendees (both male and female) who were interested in what we do and how we try to do it. I hope I left everyone with good impressions about our activities.
The conversation that most sticks in my mind was one that asked how we can be so specific (one programming language) and still have a relatively large group. I explained that - to me - being highly specific is a strength. Because we are so specific we are better able to target those we hope to help. Because of our smaller base - we can do more for our members, not just in help - but also in finding them and letting them know we are here TO help.
Anyway - All the sessions I attended were very informational and some had me laughing out loud. The night ended with a woman’s BoF (Birds of a Feather) that I threw up on the listing the day before. And though there was only a few of us that showed up, I was very happy to meet them and get a chance to sit and talk. We had a good time just chit chatting about ourselves and our lives. I love you men out there - but sometimes it is just nice to talk to another woman.
Unfortunately I had to leave rather early the last day. I did though get the opportunity to sit in on the morning keynotes and particularly enjoyed “Who is the Dick on my site”.
As for swag - got 2 t-shirts (though many more were being handed out), 2 fuzzy MySQL/Sun dolphins, 1 “stress reliever” dolphin, and I ate much too much Ghirardelli chocolate. Chocolate - Mmm
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April 15, 2008
Posted in News, php at 9:34 pm by lig
Today has been a fabulous day - MySQL really knows how to throw a party… umm Conference. Yesterday had the tutorials and I have to admit that the ones I attended (Advanced Stored Procedures and Memcache) were incredibly interesting and highly relevant. Learned about some things that aren’t even documented in the manual as of yet. And afterwards had a fun time hanging out at the bar with the MySQLers (great guys one and all).
Today I have been “womaning” the booth (Thank you again MySQL and Oreilly for giving it to us) with the help of Sebastian Bergmann and Raj Shekher - handing out business cards and stickers - talking with men and women about our group in between the sessions I am attending (Lost Art of Self Joins, EXPLAIN Demystified, Replication Tips and Tricks). Next to me is the silverstripe CMS group - and they had a gave away for an ipod shuffle… and I won! Woot.
I love this place.
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March 9, 2008
Posted in News, Events at 9:27 am by lig
| April 14, 2008 10:00 am | to | April 17, 2008 10:00 am |
Yep - I’ll be at the MySQL Conference so be sure to come and find me for talk, a sticker and maybe a drink or two.
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Posted in News, Events at 9:23 am by lig
| March 12, 2008 | to | March 14, 2008 |
Be sure to find Melanie at the PHP Quebec conference!
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Posted in News, Events at 7:54 am by KathyReid
| May 20, 2008 | to | May 23, 2008 |
PHP|tek will be held in Chicago, Illinois, United States on 20-23 May 2008.
Check out their website for more information.
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March 5, 2008
Posted in News, php at 11:03 am by lornajane
Leap Year Day, 29th February 2008, saw the annual London PHP Conference. PHPWomen were lucky enough to be able to get a stand at this conference to promote our organisation, and it was a great opportunity to get together and meet all the women that were able to be there. I didn’t get an exact count but I would say there we 20 women at the event … for a conference with 300 delegates that’s less than 7%, so it was fabulous to see so many there but its not a huge count!
What we lacked in numbers I think its fair to say we made up for in sheer enthusiasm. We took our phpwomen banner with us and it looked great tied to our stall. Maybe we should have learned from previous conferences but we didn’t take anything like as many t-shirts as people wanted, they were all gone by lunch time! It didn’t stop the torrent of people coming to the stand though, to chat to us, pick up a leaflet, or find out more about what the organisation is about.
We had a mascot too - one of the elephpants with a phpwomen branding of his own! Later in the day we also enticed visitors along with cake, which went down very well. I think the best way of expressing how much fun we had (and how much of an impact we made) is to refer you to the flickr photos.
A big thankyou to all the helpers - it was wonderful to meet you all and I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did!
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