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 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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February 23, 2008
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.
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February 5, 2008
Posted in News, php at 4:13 pm by lig
I 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.
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January 17, 2008
Posted in News, php at 10:40 am by lig
PHP elePHPants - get your PHP elePHPants here.
Cal Evans from the Zend DevZone - being the awesome guy that he is - has graciously offered to mail out to the first 10 people who donate to PHPWomen $50 or more, a PHP elePHPant. Yep - you get one of the hard to find and much sought after plushy PHP elePHPants.
Isn’t he cute!
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January 16, 2008
Posted in News, php at 10:20 am by ElizabethN
The PHPWomen.org site now has an easy way for you to help out, if you’re so inclined. We’ve added a “Donate” button so that if you have some extra cash and want to support a good cause, you can do so easily and securely.
Where will the money go?
As you know, we like to give out our free t-shirts at conferences to help spread the word about our group. Soon, you’ll be able to buy them yourself, but in the meantime the cost for all of those shirts (and the travel to and from the conferences) comes out of our pockets. Occasionally we get help from corporate sponsors, which helps tremendously, but other than that it’s really been up to us. So some of the money will go to promoting our group through giveaways and exhibiting and traveling to conferences.We also want to help out those who may be in need of training materials, help with the ZCE exam, or who want to speak at conferences, but may not afford to be able to do it. So part of the money will go to help our members achieve their goals.
Additionally, we have some cool fundraising ideas floating around, but there are times when you have to have money in order to make money. So some of the money will go to helping our fundraising ideas get off the ground.
What if you want to help out but don’t have any spare cash?
We can still use your help! We are always in need of volunteers for our mentoring program, website help, writing articles that will help our members, and help in other areas. We welcome anyone (and yes that means you too, guys) that wants to lend a helping hand. We can also use your ideas! If you have a great idea for a fundraiser or something that will make our group better and more effective, we would love to hear it! You can email me at elizabeth [at] naramore [dot] net.
Is this PHPWomen thing really making a difference?
I have had numerous women come up to me and say “thanks”. Thanks for giving them a place to go for PHP help and friendship, thanks for bringing us out of the woodwork, and thanks for saying things that they’ve always felt but couldn’t really say to anyone. I also had someone thank me for being “normal” about it and keeping the group open to everyone. Of course, the same issues exist in other languages besides PHP. Just last week I spoke to several other women at Codemash (Python, Ruby and C# devs) and while we laughed at the lack of the female presence there, it’s still unfortunate. It’d be nice to see a difference made in our PHP subculture that other groups can use to their advantage.
Incidentally, on our site, we’ve also posted the conferences where we will be exhibiting, so if you’re going to be there, please stop by our booth and say hello! (And make sure to pick up your t-shirt, sticker, or whatever we happen to be giving away at the time 
)
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Posted in News, Members, php at 9:13 am by lig
Just noticed a cool FREE webinar for those that are going after their ZCE. Zend will be holding on the 30th of January the webinar “Everything you need to know about the PHP 5 Certification Exam“
So if you are chasing after that elusive ZCE and feel like you need more - or are considering going after your ZCE, be sure to attend. Can’t hurt anything and may just give you want you need to feel confident taking the test.
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January 15, 2008
Posted in Interviews, php at 3:23 am by sree
I am very glad to present my first interview for PHPWomen with NancyW
NancyW - a well known drupal developer, documentation contributor, module developer/maintainer apart from these a prestigious WOMEN in the world of opensource.Here in this part of the interview she shares few of her experiences with us giving motivation to the fellow new comers (especially women new comers into open source).
1. Can you give us a walk through about what is that ‘PMP’ all about?
It stands for “Project Management Professional.” It’s a professional certification for project managers and is administered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). To obtain the certification, one must demonstrate having met certain education and experience requirements – and pass a hellacious test. You could look at it as like a “CPA” for project managers.
2. What was your college major?
Okay, no laughing! My major was physics. Of course that required a minor in math. To help with my homework, which had a lot of plug-in-the-numbers-and-turn-the-crank, I took a Fortran course. That turned into an intensive minor than almost became a second major. I did look at graduate school in computer science, but there was no real “standard” curriculum between schools then and my undergraduate studies were almost the same as the graduate school, so I just went to work as a programmer.
3. Which is your major interest - management or technology?
Yes and no. 
I originally went into management because I had pretty much exhausted technology in the mainframe environment, which is where I was at the time. Then I was asked, because of my planning skills, to lead a project that involved the technology I knew so well. That was the birth of the project manager. Management without the headache part; new challenges on every project! I can learn as much or as little as I want about the technology involved. So, I guess you could say my interest is really in challenge. (Does anyone know about the “DaVinci” personality?)
4. How did you find interest in Drupal all the way from project management?
This is a somewhat condensed version of the whole boring story.
I had begun learning HTML several years ago and knew enough to be dangerous. After my husband died and being unemployed, I created a web site for me to try to organize the things I had written (and myself). Along the way, some trouble started brewing in a group to which some friends belonged and they expected it to get worse, so they asked me to prepare in case their web site to go away suddenly. When their fears came true, I was able to quickly get their site back up with some improvements.
Unfortunately, both that site and mine were using frames, and I found out that search engines don’t like frames. Converting to non-frames wasn’t hard, but maintaining the navigation was. During my time with IBM, I had a [very] slight knowledge of content management systems, so I decided to look into it. I don’t remember why, but I started looking at XOOPs, but they couldn’t keep their documentation servers up long enough for me to get a grasp on how to proceed.
So I started looking at Drupal and liked it. It did everything I needed – and a whole lot more. I downloaded it (using the package from DeveloperSode.net) and started playing. Converting my site that was all static pages is pretty close to trivial for Drupal, so it went quickly. Then my host didn’t like that I bothered them with questions and they pulled the plug suddenly on both of the sites. I found a new host in a matter of minutes and transferred my site; it was down for less than two hours. The other site still had to be converted to Drupal, but I had time while the registrar released the domain (that was a major hassle). To make it short, when the domain finally got released – a week later – I had the new, Drupal-based, site ready and it went right up. I haven’t looked back.
Since then I have created several more sites, some live, some just for me (on my PC). All of them use Drupal. I got involved on the Drupal forums as a way to help me learn more. I wrote a “book” to help other newcomers get up to speed. Then I started getting people asking for help, so Nancy-the-Drupal-web-site-builder was born. Then I needed to do something that didn’t work quite right in core Drupal, so I developed a module (an add-on feature), with help from another helpful soul, to do it. Since then I’ve written several more modules and a lot more documentation. [I’m actually a bit amazed at all that I have done in the first year with Drupal.]
5. Can you list out your best as well worst experiences that you have come across in your career path?
At the risk of sounding philosophical, I’ve come to feel that experiences are neither “good” not “bad.” They simply are; and each one contributes to who you are now. Hopefully one learns something from all those experiences whether others consider them good or bad. Having said that, let me try to answer your question.
When I joined IBM, I didn’t know that project management was something you could study, let alone be certified in. I just thought you either had a knack for it or didn’t. So I learned a lot about project management from IBM’s education and I try to pass it on when I get the chance.
Another thing I learned from IBM was how to be a consultant. Not everyone is cut out for it. In some ways it’s harder than being someone’s employee.
As for “bad” experiences, one of my most traumatic also came from IBM: being laid off for the first time (along with about half their workforce). For the first time in my life I was unemployed involuntarily. This was a big shock and an unpleasant education.
6. Have you ever had problems with people not taking you seriously because of who you are or your background?
Yes, this has happened, and will probably continue. People from all over the world adopt OS applications so you run into people from cultures where women are not supposed to work or are considered second-class citizens. You have to try to ignore those attitudes and move on.
The second problem I’ve run into, and it should diminish over time, is that I’m new to OS, so people think I can’t possibly know what I’m doing. This is largely the error of the young – they have trouble realizing that experience elsewhere can be carried over to the new environment. For example, while I am new to PHP, I have been programming for over 30 years so organizing my thoughts into a program, whatever language it is written in, is nothing new. Those who started with, or have only used, PHP may have trouble realizing that my experience gives me a leg up.
And then that brings me to some attitudes I have run up against with Drupal. Being new AND a woman, many don’t take me seriously – including other women. There was one module that I was told that I couldn’t write. What a shock when I did!
But there are still those within the Drupal community who belittle me, even though I am now the fourth highest contributor to the documentation and have (at this writing) contributed six modules (more on the way) and taken on co-maintainer status on three others. What’s a girl to do?
7. What are your likes/dislikes about open source?
Hmm, this may be a case where the two are intertwined; that is that the things you like may also be the things you dislike.
I like having the source code, particularly when I’m having trouble understanding the application. It allows me to dig in and find out what it does (as opposed to what it “should” do). This can be a double-edged sword: reading and understanding the code takes time away from implementing it.
I like being able to extend or improve the code, but, again, this takes more time than asking someone else to do it.
Often OS applications are written (and maintained) by people who do not make much, if any, money from it. That means that her or his motivation to make improvements waxes and wanes with their interest and other circumstances. This may very well place the burden of fixes or improvements upon you, the adopter. Further, submitting those changes also takes time and energy. But, on the positive side, you get those changes on your schedule, not theirs.
8. Any advice from your side to newcomers to the field of open source?
These first two things I learned a long time ago, but many people don’t seem to have realized them:
· The computer is a high-speed moron. Barring electronics breakdowns, it does what you tell it to, when you tell it, and only what you tell it. If you don’t get the results you wanted, you made the mistake. Note that “you” here is plural – it includes the programmer as well.
· Don’t be afraid of the computer. It has no feelings or ulterior motives; it does not intend to scare you. If it “breaks,” it deserved it; someone didn’t do his or her job right.
Here is a bit of advice more specific to open source:
· Since the developers are often poor documenters, a good way to start is to contribute by writing better documentation. You will learn more and the developer will usually be happy that you did.
· Most OS applications have forums (or is that fora) for discussion, questions, issues, etc. Get involved; it’s a great way to learn.
· If you find a bug or need a new feature, make the change and contribute the changes (a “patch”). Most developers also welcome this. Be prepared to explain why the change is needed (also called a “use case”).
9. Can you tell us more about yourself? - Something about how you started your career, how was your journey, what are your present assignments, etc.
Well, I mentioned earlier that I started programming to help with homework. When I left college, I got a job with the State of South Carolina as a programmer. For several reasons, that led me into being a systems programmer – at that time, this was the person who maintained the operating system on your mainframe (there were no PCs then). I stayed in that role, evolving with the operating systems, for about 15 years, then became the manager over a staff of systems programmers. Then there was a need for someone to oversee a project for another division and I filled in doing that. That led to my becoming the “Manager of Special Projects” for the company.
After that, my husband and I started our own franchised business. That didn’t work out as we planned, so I went back to work as a programmer, eventually moving back into being a project manager at a large credit card processing center. But we didn’t like California, so when IBM came along, I moved. That got me into being a consulting project manager until I got laid off (the second time).
At that point my husband was noticing some serious physical problems and the job market for project managers was almost non-existent. We eventually found out it was terminal (ALS) so I decided to stop beating my head against the employment wall for a while to stay with him. After his death there was still not much of a job market and our savings were almost gone. My mother needed a caregiver so I started doing that.
I mentioned above how that morphed into doing web sites, and that’s where I am today.
10. How do you manage your time among all these things?
Poorly! 
My personality style is that I tend to work on what I want to at the time. This is not good when you want to work for someone else – they want your undivided attention. I am much better at managing other people’s time than my own.
11. What are your other hobbies?
Well, at the moment, I don’t have the time or money to do much, so I guess that my current “hobby” is improving, extending, and promoting Drupal.
When I had regular, gainful employment, I enjoyed “artsy” type photography, landscaping, and sailing. Unfortunately, circumstances caused me to lose my sailing partner and boat, so that’s gone. The other two I just can’t afford.
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January 9, 2008
Posted in News, Members, php at 10:07 am by lornajane
Happy New Year! Our New Year’s resolution is to dust off the mailing list and start using it - we have quite a few subscribers already so let’s get started already.
You can find the signup pages and information at http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/phpwomen, where you will find all the information you need - if you already signed up you can also change your settings and get a password reminder from this page. So no excuses, we’ll see you on the mailing list - everyone is warmly welcome.
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November 21, 2007
Posted in News, Articles, php at 10:54 am by lornajane
At the beginning of November I attended the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. This was my first attendance at any of the larger conferences and I thought I’d share my experiences as a conference newbie. The most noticeable thing was that all kinds of minorities were wildly under-represented. There were very few people over 35, female or with non-caucasian appearances. On the women front I counted about ten, excluding organisers, and I’d say most of these were attending the AJAX strand of the conference - on the PHP front there were only two female speakers.
The hotel itself was a really nice venue, and well-suited to an event of this kind. Between talks there were plenty of drinks and coffee laid out for everyone, and the snacks which were provided in some of the breaks were really tasty. Their meeting rooms were well-equipped with projectors and so on, however the wireless network didn’t survive the strain of so many geeks in a small area and was intermittent at best. The “expo” was about 5 stands clogging up the entrance hall, with the main sponsors each having a stand. EZ Systems, SugarCRM, Code Gear, Mayflower and some german-language publishers were there, and there was a Zend Lounge in the corner consisting of three sofas.
The night before the main conference, there was an event called “Code Camp @ Night” where two internals developers (Marcus Boerger and Johannes Schluter) delivered a workshop on extending PHP. The session also featured pizza and beer which I saw as a major selling point. The website listed the session and said that it was imperative to register for it, however there was no means to do so on the site and my repeated emails to the organisers met with no response. Since we weren’t registered on the conference until the following day we didn’t think we’d be able to attend but we dropped in to the hotel a day early and were told we’d be welcome at this event, which was great news! The event itself was really interesting, if a bit over my head.
Pizza aside, the food throughout the conference was extremely good. The days were very long, with two meals being served on the Tuesday and a main meal on Wednesday. It was a hot and cold buffet setup with large dining spaces - I think everyone managed to find something they were happy to eat, with fruit, salads and dessert being available as well as a selection of hot food.
One thing I found strange throughout the conference was that almost all the attendees and speakers had German as a first language. There were sessions in both English and German but even the English sessions often started with “does anyone NOT speak German?”, with the speaker hoping to be able to communicate in the majority language of the assembled group . Since I only speak English I felt quite awkward about the whole thing and having sessions in both languages didn’t really work that well for me as there were quite a few that I couldn’t attend. The keynotes were all in English and perhaps it would have been more straightforward to have everything in one language or another - in the end I had to go through and highlight which sessions I _could_ attend and then choose from those.
The keynotes were of varying degrees of interest and quality. First up was Zak Greant with his “Age of Literate Machines”. This was a fantastic and inspiring talk, Zak was eloquent and interesting and his slides were excellent. His point, that only open systemns should be used for government of society in order that everyone can understand the mechanism that controls their lives, was noble and thought-provoking. The following day Derick Rethans’ talk “Personal Home Page Tools Have Grown Up” showed a clear (and amusing) history of how his experience has grown alongside the language and how much he and it have developed along the way. The final talk was much less interesting, Bill Scott on “Design Patterns and Principles”; this didn’t involve design patterns but instead revolved entirely around inaccessible, client-side technologies. I’m sure the point of this talk was to cater to the AJAX conference that was happening in tandem with the PHP one, but it didn’t do anything for me and I hope it wasn’t representative of the content in that strand.
The sessions themselves were generally very good, with four to choose from at any given time. On the first day I think I picked the mainstream topics since quite a few of the talks I attended were standing room only. I can’t speak in general about the sessions as of course I only attended a small sample of the choice of sessions that were available, but what I did see was very interesting, put across well, and were well-prepared which is always a bonus!
There were long breaks between the sessions which was excellent and allowed for plenty of chattering, coffee drinking and table football (I lost count of the number of times I was asked the English word for it!) and enabled everyone to mingle. On the Tuesday evening, the middle night of the main conference, there was a Casino Night, with Poker, BlackJack and Pontoon tables running with a free bar. The games looked like fun but basically I couldn’t stop meeting new people for long enough to try them out! Certainly it was a good ice-breaker and people who didn’t know anyone could sit at the games tables and get talking with others as the evening progressed. To add a finishing touch to the conference I was also able to tag along to dinner in a local eatery with a bunch of speakers and others who were staying over the night following the conference - talk about being in with the cool kids!
All in all I am really glad I made the effort to go, I met quite a few people in person that I knew of by reputation or had met online. Having never attended a conference it was interesting to see how things work, see different styles of speaking and presenting, and generally get a feel for these things. The party atmosphere I heard so much about from ZendCon and the php| conferences was definitely missing from this one, however I did have a good time regardless. Would I go again? I don’t think I would, I paid for the conference and the trip myself since my employers didn’t see it as worthwhile, and for two days I must say it really did seem like a lot of money. I won’t say it was a bad conference, and I don’t have a lot to compare it to - certainly there is nothing else close to it in Europe. Perhaps if I wish for it enough the rumours of a European ZendCon will come true one day …
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My personality style is that I tend to work on what I want to at the time. This is not good when you want to work for someone else – they want your undivided attention. I am much better at managing other people’s time than my own.
