PHPWomen

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!

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!

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

At the recent PHPNW conference, PHPWomen met a new friend, Tess Barnes.  She has been kind enough to write about her experiences and share them with us.

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Up until November 2008 I was a conference virgin: no jollies, no hotel booking panic and no development talks. As I’ve been self employed as a website developer for three years I decided it was about time to break the mould, invest the profits and head up to Manchester. Working from home with a small group of local customers can lead to an insular perspective and feeling in a rut, surely the best thing to do is get together with like minded professions? Of course, it seems so obvious but it still took me three years to get there!

So why did it take so long? The first thing most people think of is money; yes conferences can be expensive, but you can make it cheaper if you share cars, book buses in advance, go for b&b or find a friends sofa. Another usual barrier is picking the most relevant event to go to, there’s so many to choose from and some days they all seem to be in the US.  Actually my initial stumbling block was finding out about conferences in the first place. Reading the ‘right resources’ will give you a window onto the whole spectrum of geekups, barcamps, lugs, php*s, but what if you don’t know the ‘right resources’? Twitter helped, following everyone featured in the following list of respected friends was a good start and adding feeds such as Planet PHP  and A List Apart to my RSS reader was a huge leg-up too.

So armed with the right information all I had to do was book and figure out how to afford it? Almost – I also had to get over the fear.

I dealt with a few assumptions:
1) I didn’t know anyone, (apart from the lovely person giving me a lift)
2) I didn’t know anything,
3) As soon as I opened my mouth I was going to make myself look a fool.

By following the excellent pre conference run up on twitter and the conference site itself I found out about other people who were going, what they were interested in or looking forward to and where they were travelling from.  I picked out talks I wanted to go to and made time to go to the socials – quite easy as a freelance but planning ahead can also help make this
possible for the employed too.

Forcing myself to speak to complete strangers brought me up against assumptions 2 and 3. In the end I found the simplest thing to do was to admit I didn’t know how much PHP I knew and say I was there to learn and meet people who knew more. Just let me say this was a good move! By being open to new ideas and admitting I didn’t know as much as I wanted to automatically I avoided looking too much of a fool. Not drinking too much on the Friday night helped but I cannot recommend enough the power of being honest.

I even got the chance to meet some of the speakers and kill an assumption I didn’t even know I had – they are all very approachable rather than the stuffy elitists I thought they might be.

Once I’d arrived and got over the Friday night social jitters it was time for the actual conference. Although I’ve not been to an event like this before, I’ve heard plenty of horror stories: lost registrations, badly signed venues, schedules run amok and tedious talks. I’m so pleased to say PHPNW08 was none of that!

The whole venue was well signed – from street to seat, the registration staff and crew were friendly and helpful. the schedule was clearly posted and appeared in the goodie bag.  Talks started on time and were thoroughly engaging. Sadly, some talks (particularly the HTML to Drupal) had little time for questions but everything I attended was well worth going to. If anyone is interested there is a list of the talks I attended at the end of the article.

It was a very full day of intense concentration punctuated by fresh air and coffee but unbelievably worth it. The talks weren’t the only reason for going of course, I wanted to make contact with members of PHPWomen in real life, find out who on earth the talented and vocal LornaJane is, take a look at exhibition stands, complete a brainbench test, see a demo of the Zend Framework, talk to recruiters and even come home with offers of new work! Completely unrealistically long
list of things to achieve as it turns out

I have come away from my first conference with a whole new raft of assumptions:
- I don’t know as much as I want to about PHP, MySQL, HTML5, frameworks, testing, security….
- There are loads of resources out there on the web and in my local area to learn more or meet up with geeks like me such as PHPWomen, phpWM, whatwg, and freelance switch.
- I didn’t miss out on everything just because I wasn’t glued to irc all day
- Freelancing is a wonderful way to work
- I’m actually more of a front end developer
- Women can get exactly where they want to in the industry with hard work and determination (just like anyone else) Lorna and Johanna are just two of the successful developers that I had the chance to meet.
- The absolute best way to kick yourself out of a jaded rut is to get out and meet people, go to a conference, geekup, barcamp, php group in your area (or out of your area for a change)
- phpNW08 was the best choice for a first conference, no question. It was well run, open, friendly, and fired up my enthusiasm for the community and industry where I now feel at home.

I owe all that to the fabulous people behind PHPNW08, organisers and sponsors. A huge thank you to Jeremy
(phpcodemonkey) for taking the gamble, the crew for keeping it all running so smoothly, Lorna and Johanna for inviting me
into the PHPWomen fold, Smylers for being unfailingly enthusiastic and to Stuart for driving.

I attended (and surprised myself by understanding):

Welcome Keynote: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Derick Rethans
Highlighting techniques we all forget in the great web2.0 takeover such as URLs that make human sense and the real place for spaghetti

First Steps with Zend Framework
Rob Allen
An excellent introduction to a sensible alternative to Notebook ++ and indicated just how much I don’t know about frameworks and php development.

From HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes
James Panton & Chris Maiden
A brave and successful live coding based talk that embraced visual teaching rather than discussing abstracts. I’m still not sure about Drupal but I liked the approach.

HTML 5: What’s that all about? 
Smylers
Hugely energetic and enthusiastic talk by someone who knows and
obviously feels passionately about their subject. Most of my post-PHPNW
research so far has been around HTML5, standards and CSS.

Twittex: From idea to live in 7 days
Stuart Herbert
As a freelancer I find I also need to know about the commercial world, cost, promotion and planning. It was great to hear about the development of a new service in the wider business context.

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Tess also sent over some photos to share of her day

 
Thanks Tess!!

The new eposiode of Sun’s SDN (Sun Developer Network) features phpwomen.org!  I spent a few minutes chatting on the phone with Cassandra from SDN and she recorded it so she could share with her listeners – you can find the podcast at http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/introduction_to_phpwomen_org plus there is other interesting tech content so have a click around!

At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled “Women in IT”.  In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP.  We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded – the audio can be found at:

http://www.phpwomen.org/wordpress/uploads/PHPW_uncon.mp3

Juliette shared some interesting links with us, pages and conversations that had given her the motivation to run a session like this and examine the issues – in particular http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/02/23/diverse-it-gets/

We’ve also set up a forum thread for us to discuss this further – so feel free to drop in there and add your thoughts.  Finally, here’s an overview of the main points of the session, in case your headphones aren’t handy:

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We kicked off the session with agreement that women in IT is a good thing. Then we looked in more detail at the pros and cons

Women in IT is not a good thing because:
- sexism wouldn’t be an issue if the women weren’t there
- men become more competitive with the women around, not in a good way
- women make it harder for a team to communicate, because some men don’t know how to talk to them
- women with kids can have “emergencies” – so more work for everyone else
- women sometimes get jobs on “affirmative action”/”positive discrimintation” grounds

Women in IT/PHP is good because:
- women make the men more civilised and better behaved
- women have an alternative perspective
- women have more empathy with the user experience
- better for business
- women are good team players
- women are more conscienscious and pay attention to detail
- women smell better

There was agreement that most guys are fine and there is just the occassional bad apple – but that this can put women off for life. We discussed how hard it is for outsiders to intervene in a situation where a woman is getting a hard time from someone else. The women are usually strong personalities, and can be slightly uptight about guys coming in and “rescuing” them. The guys who are seeing it happening will have difficulty identifying when to step in or even that there is an issue at all.

We identified issues with women not putting themselves forward unless they feel they are *better* than others, where men do it when they feel they are *as good*. The men are more comfortable with “blowing their own trumpet” about what they have been doing, whereas women may consider it to be all in a day’s work. When conferences are selecting speakers, they need to see the speaking/writing this particular person has been doing, so it must be easy to find. We also discussed how women are often raised to be modest and supportive – and often they don’t realise how much self-promotion is done by men that they need to compete with.

Elizabeth mentioned that one of the purposes of phpwomen is to mentor more women – and show them the steps to promote themselves. The organisation publishes when calls for papers are happening, and helps show newcomers how to prepare their abstract, bio, and so on. Some colleges teach public speaking, but not everyone has that experience or takes these opportunities when they are optional. Men need this just as much as women do to become speakers too, this is not a gender-specific issue.

Women tend not to study computer science, its not really culturally acceptable and the profession isn’t appealing – so they don’t ever try it, they’re never exposed to code. Its completely normal for women to never write a line of code, not all teachers/parents are able to let youngsters try these things out.

We all took turns to say the ways we will help support women in IT/PHP:
- Go to phpwomen, answer forum questions, helps men and women (public forum).
- Mentorship program – we have big sisses and little sisses, people will grow to nuture new joiners
- Go into schools and show the girls that software is *creative*
- Answer questions and support people on the IRC channel
- Women could be submitting talks and/or having presence at geek events
- Conference/User group organisers: invite and encourage female speakers
- Accept candidates for work experience, including women/girls
- Encourage women to write for forum or c7y
- Support women in the workplace

We also noted that almost all the bad experiences have almost all been in workplaces – not in the development community.
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Thanks to Juliette for running the session!