Tag: conference

I don't mean learning to talk, I mean learning to address an audience, coherently and without dying of fright (actually I think I have clinically proven that it isn't possible to actually stop living as a result of fright). There are a couple of things that I'm involved with that may help you, if you're looking to improve your successes in this area.

There's an excellent open source conference that happens every year in Brussels in February, called FOSDEM. It consists of some main tracks, plus a series of sub-rooms, where various technical communities are given some space to use for whichever talks they choose; the schedules are centralised so that people can …

While I'm in the US in a week or so, I'll be joining a stellar lineup at Confident Coding on October 20th in San Francisco. This is a by-women, for-women event to let us get together in a safe space where there are no stupid questions, and try to cover …

In July, I'm speaking at OSCON. Actually I have a few interesting speaking engagements coming up, and I haven't got around to adding upcoming dates to my blog yet but I'll be at phpDay in Verona next week with a talk on API Design and DPC in Amsterdam in June with a tutorial on Web Services and a talk on what OAuth is actually for.

OSCON is special because I have always wanted to go and never imagined it would actually happen. Every year I read the list of sessions from the year before, and decide that I absolutely must submit to the call for papers, regardless of how small I think my chances of being accepted are! I've submitted a couple of times in the past, excluding last year because I was newly freelance (OSCON does not cover any speaker expenses at all, they just give you a conference pass. That's kind of hard going for those of us self-funding halfway across the world, and last year, I just couldn't do it. This year I still can't really justify it but I'm going anyway!)

At the weekend (yes, this took all week to write), I was on my first ever visit to Poland, in order to speak at PHPCon Poland. They contacted me early in the year to ask if I would consider going along to give my talk Teach a Man to Fish.

A few weeks ago, while attending the delightful OggCamp, I was approached by someone asking me to speak at PyConUK. Well ...

Planning an event of any kind? Let me share with you what I have learned so far about how the numbers for these things actually work and how to understand the "what to charge" vs "how many people" balance.

I'm updating my web services tutorial session at the moment for the PHPNW Tutorial Day. I switch the order of the topics around every time, in an effort to make it more digestible, and I thought I'd share.

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be speaking at OggCamp this year. This is an event that I've attended both previous years, and one that I always seem to get a lot out of. It's an open source, anything goes, unconference kind of event. Except that this year there is …

I am a female speaker, and a software developer, which puts me in a fairly small minority at the events I usually attend (I'm a PHP consultant based in the UK, to give you an idea of what kind of events those are). Recently I've been asked my opinion more than once on the issue of women speakers being in a minority at technical events, and I've also been the "token" women speaker at a technical event.

The worst thing you can do is find some random, underqualified person who represents the demographic you want to include, and put them on the stage. Although gender is often the issue we hear most about, the same applies to anyone who isn't a young, white male; it's just that gender is easier to see and talk about than either age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or anything else, and also since I'm a young, white female, it's the only aspect I can comment on.Women are in such a minority that they are, almost by definition, representative (see http://xkcd.com/385). Anyone who sees your randomly-selected woman speak will simply go away thinking that women aren't really good at speaking.

We might still be in the thick of the summer conference season, but there's an event coming up this autumn which has me very excited: PHP North West 2011.

This is a regional PHP conference based in Manchester, UK, and I've been involved with it since it began (I'm surprised to find this is our fourth edition, it still feels like a shiny new adventure!). This year the dates are 8th and 9th of October and with an added tutorial day on the Friday, it is bigger (and of course better) than ever. In case you missed the announcements, here are the main things you need to know:

If you are attending my Web Services tutorial at PHP Community Conference (if not, probably nothing for you to see here) later this week then you might like to download the sample code. I'll be referring to this and inviting you to "play along" as I go creating services during …

Conference season approaches and in May I'm on a trip to take in two of the most high-profile events in the PHP conference calendar: DPC in Amsterdam (19-21 May) and php|tek in Chicago (24-27 May). The two events have historically been a few weeks apart and I've always complained at having all the fun for the year in such a short space of time - but this year the events are literally back-to-back, there are a small number of speakers attending both and we're pretty much all on the same flight from Amsterdam to Chicago!

Next month, I'll be heading out to Nashville for the PHP Community Conference. This is wildly exciting for a few reasons; this is the first in what I hope will be many episodes of this event, and I'm speaking in a lineup that blows every other conference schedule I've seen …

I'm seeing increasing numbers of unconferences popping up and I must say I'm quite enjoying them. Last year I went to OggCamp, we included an unconference at DPC, and now there's a PHP-specific event coming up in Manchester: PHP Unconference Europe or phpuceu. I really like unconferences but I think sometimes people don't know what to expect, so here's an outline.

Last weekend I was at the PHPBenelux 2011 conference in Antwerp. As conferences go it was pretty awesome, completely surpassing my expectations in many ways! The schedule was published in advance but I somehow forgot how many friends I have in that part of the world and what a wonderful …

In June 2011 I'll be speaking at a rather awesome event called DIBI at the Sage in Gateshead (if you're a southerner, then Gateshead is near Newcastle, which is "up north"). DIBI stands for "Design It, Build It" and has two tracks, one focussing on development and one focussing on …

I'm very excited to hear that the PHPUnConference Europe (@phpuceu on twitter) is coming to Manchester on February 19th and 20th! So excited, in fact, that I've rushed out and bought my ticket (for a whole £40, that's a good investment in my opinion). The event brings together the PHP …

Have you got your tickets for PHPBenelux yet? If not then I hope you will do so because I would love to see you there!

I'll be delivering a keynote at the PHPBenelux Conference in Antwerp in January alongside my good friend Ivo Jansch. Between us we've got plenty of …

This weekend I'm presenting at DayCamp4Developers, a virtual event comprising a full day of workshops for developers of all disciplines to improve their soft skills and move forward in their career. I get to attend since I'm speaking, but even after I've given my slot I know I'll be online …

Earlier in the year I gave a talk at PHP UK in London entitled "Best Practice for API Design". I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free …

Last weekend I gave a talk at PHPNW10 in Manchester, entitled "Teach a Man to Fish". This is a keynote about teams and how to use the resources around you to create a team where individuals and the whole team continues to learn and develop. The slides are not very …

I get to a lot of events and the crowds at each one are different and there's a different atmosphere - but at every event there are people who are making the whole thing less enjoyable for everyone else. Probably a lot of those people don't much care what effect their behaviour has on other people, but if you want to avoid being one of those people, these are my tips:

This is the final post in a short series about hosting events, based purely on my own experience and no specific expertise, in the hope that they will be useful to others doing similar things. If you are interested, you can read the first two posts, about preparing for the event and what to do on the day. This post is about some of the additional things about an event; sharing the content afterwards, getting feedback from attendees, and the most important bit - the social event.

I'm very excited by a new virtual event which is coming up, and at which I have been invited to speak. This is Day Camp 4 Developers, an event aimed at developers of all disciplines and focussing on the soft skills that sometimes we miss in our pursuit of technical excellence. I'll be giving my talk "Open Source Your Career", which looks at how being involved in open source outside of work can improve our professional development. The event is on November 6th, and you can buy tickets here.

There are a number of things that really appeal to me about this event:

This post is the second in a series of three about organising and hosting events. If you're interested, you could also read the first post about event preparation.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. Namebadges (sticky labels and pen if nothing else) will be needed at registration, if you have tickets and need to tick people off then rope in lots of volunteers (it sounds like a lot but 3-5% of your total attendee count is ideal) and brief them, and spread out across as much space as you have so you can parallelise as much as possible - registration is always chaos because of course everyone shows up at once and causes a backlog!

I've been to a lot of events, mostly technical, software-related ones, and I've also helped organise a few as well. For people organising events for the first time there are definitely some pitfalls that might not be obvious until you actually, well, until you fall into them! I thought I'd capture my experiences into a series of blog posts, in case they can help any future organisers to avoid some of the traps. First up: what to do before your event starts.

This weekend I'm at froscon in Germany, giving two talks. One had no slides (but may have video, if I see it then I will post the link here) and the other was "Working with Web Services" which I gave this morning in the PHP room. My slides are here …

I spent the weekend in Bristol so I could attend cicon2010 - a volunteer-organised first-edition conference around the CodeIgniter PHP Framework. It started on Saturday morning with registration at 8:30am and the first talk at 9am. When I arrived (at about ten to nine) there were no organisers there. I …

I'm slightly surprised but mostly wildly excited to announce that I'll be the keynote speaker at the PHP North West Conference in October. It is held in Manchester in the UK, which is about an hour from where I live in Leeds, so it is definitely my "home" conference, and …

In August I'll be attending FrOSCon in Germany for the first time, and speaking there. It's a mixed technology conference, with rooms set aside for separate scheduling for various projects and technologies. I'll be speaking in the PHP room, delivering "Working With Web Services", a talk which covers how to …

It's official, PHP North West 2010 is definitely happening ... and for that we'll need some people to pop along and give a talk! As in previous years, we'll first of all deal with selecting the papers for our main conference day, 9th October. Talks can be 60 minutes or 30 …

In this post, I am asking for your help and input, although it might seem like a post about nothing in particular to begin with. Please keep reading!

Last month, I gave a talk at TEK-X entitled "Open Source Your Career". Personally I think that a lot of the high …

I spent most of last week and the weekend in (rather rainy) Amsterdam for the Dutch PHP Conference. This is an event that is in its 4th year, although I was attending for only the 3rd time. Two years ago, I spoke at DPC - my first conference talk. This year …

Describing something as a "poor man's" version of the thing is to say its a bit of a cheap or short-cutting version. I thought I'd share some VERY poor man's caching that I came up with the other day.

To set the scene - I'm hosting the Dutch PHP Conference this …

I'm subscribed to a number of women-in-tech mailing lists because, well, I'm a woman in tech. Every few months or so a thread will come round about a technical conference with no female speakers. The issues around this are many, lengthy, and not something I want to write about here …

As the Host of the Dutch PHP Conference this year, you can imagine I'm squeaky-excited about the whole event. This story goes right back to last year though, when someone (Ivo? Cal? I don't know who) conceived the idea of including an unconference in this year's event. DPC is easily …

Its been quiet around here recently, partly because I have been really busy and partly because I was in Chicago last week for the wonderful TEK-X conference. It would be very cool to get to go skipping around the world to conferences, however people paying for my airfares do seem …

A couple of years ago, I attended ZendCon for the first time. At that time, the only laptop I had was a work machine weighing 5kg, and I was staying in a different hotel from the main conference - so I hastily bought pretty much the first non-ee netbook on the …

This is a podcast version of my rant-in-the-bar advice to anyone thinking about speaking, or wondering how to begin. Personally I think many more people could be sharing their expertise at events than actually do so, and I would really like anyone who wants to get involved to have a …

Next week I'm speaking at the PHPNW User Group in Manchester on Tuesday Evening, 4th May - full details of the event are on upcoming.org. The talk isn't directly about PHP though; I'll be giving my "Open Source Your Career" talk, discussing how contributing to the community can really help …

Update! This post is now outdated - the import functionality on joind.in has been replaced with a CSV import.

As a conference organiser I work extensively with the site joind.in, which allows attendees to comment on sessions at a conference. Recently the site has also started supporting sessions with …

I'm really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people - this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag …

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Since Ibuildings is partly a dutch company I combined this with one of my regular trips to meet with the people there, visiting both our offices in the Netherlands and catching up with a bunch …

There is an announcement over on the DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) website - their Call for Papers is now open (so go submit!). What's remarkable about this announcement is that I wrote it, and its signed with my name and the words "Your host this year" ... yes, I'm hosting DPC.

I'm …

I'm always pleased to be accepted as a speaker but I'm especially delighted to hear that I'm speaking at TEK·X in Chicago this May. They had a crazy number of submissions for the number of slots available, and I really wanted to go since I spoke there last year …

I'm pleased to announce that this year I'll be speaking at PHPUK in London in February. I've attended this conference for the last three years, and attend its related user group, PHP London whenever I can find a reason to be in London on the right day. My talk this …

I'm delighted to announce that I'm speaking at the inaugural PHP Benelux Conference, to be held on Saturday 30th January in Antwerp, Belgium. The talk will be "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World"; I gave this talk PHPNW09 in October and it was well-received there, so hopefully I …

I've been updating my conference details recently, in order to submit my talks for php|tek in Chicago (the call for papers closes on Monday - get your submissions in!). One thing which I struggled with is my biography, I used to have a paragraph which sort of said "Lorna is …

I spent the last few days in sunny Spain at the PHP Barcelona conference as a speaker. Happily the most reasonably-priced flights gave me some time while I was there to get into the city, I was very keen to see it because I haven't been before. The trip was …

Last weekend was the second annual PHP North West Conference, held at Manchester Conference Centre and attended by 200 people. We kicked off our weekend on Friday night, with a pre-conference social in a pub near to the conference venue. There wasn't really enough space but it contained geeky things …

Thanks to a wonderful combination of slideshare actually working and conference wifi being rather excellent, the slides from my talk "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World" are now online, you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/passing-the-joel-test-in-the-php-world.

If you were there, please leave feedback for …

Having just put the finishing touches to the schedule for PHPNW09, I'm realising just how excited I am about this event coming up in less than a fortnight. This is the second year we've run the event, and its bigger and better than last year - and I know what a …

I'm delighted to announce I'll be speaking at the PHP Barcelona Conference in October. This is a new speaking topic for me, although I've been working and blogging in this area for a while, with a talk entitled "Working with Web Services". Its a very technical session looking at different …

At the moment I am getting to quite a few conferences, as a speaker, as an organiser, and sometimes as a plain old attendee. I get so much from these opportunities to learn from experts in their various fields, meet people in the flesh whose blogs I read or whom …

I have experience of PHP conferences from all possible angles - as an attendee, as a speaker and as an organiser. At PHP North West this year I will be taking this to new heights and combining all three roles into a single one-day conference. I have a speaking slot at …

Plans for the second annual PHP North West conference (Manchester, 10th October) are coming along rather nicely, so I thought I'd share an update and some headline news. First of all - tickets cost 50 GBP + VAT. This is about 57 euros or 81 dollars. I don't know where else you …

These are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.

The date for PHPNW was announced a few weeks ago as Saturday 10th October 2009, and now we've got all the official bits and bobs to go with it! In outline:

The website: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk

Tickets: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/register. Early bird pricing until September …

Often when I attend PHP conferences, I blog as I go along, upload a few photos and generally share with others who aren't in attendance. At DPC this year I completely failed to do any of the above - no excuses, I was just having too much fun :)

I travelled over …

This time next week I'll be full of new ideas and enthusiasm as the Dutch PHP Conference 2009 will have ended. Last year was the first time I attended the event and I have memories of a great crowd and some fabulous sessions, also my first experience speaking at a …

Last night at the PHPNW user group we announced this year's conference - PHPNW09. We don't have a lot of detail but here is a run-down of all the information I have:

• Date: Saturday 10th October 2009
• Location: Manchester Conference Centre. It's a new venue but just as central and actually …

Last week I was at the php|tek 2009 conference in Chicago. This was a really exciting trip for me - only my second conference as a speaker and the first time I'd attended any of the MTA conferences. I was absolutely delighted to have three of my sessions accepted into …

I'm currently attending the php|tek conference in Chicago. Today is tutorial day, and I delivered a half-day session with Matthew Weier O'Phinney of Zend. Our session was entitled "Practical SVN for PHP Developers" and the slides are online. The session seems to have gone over pretty well - this is …

This year I'm excited to be heading to the php|tek conference in Chicago (May 19th to 22nd), and even more excited to be going there as a speaker. Over the course of the conference I will present or co-present three sessions; one tutorial and two talks.

The tutorial session …

Last week I was in London for the annual PHP conference held by the PHP London User Group. One thing that makes this conference different from any others I've attended is that its organised by volunteers. Another thing which makes it unique is that I have attended more than one …

The Call for Papers for the Dutch PHP Conference 2009 is currently open - with only a week left, it closes next week on Friday 13th. I went to this conference in Amsterdam for the first time last year, when I was still relatively new in my job at Ibuildings. This …

The OSCON Call for Participation is open for another couple of days and I've finally got over my nerves and submitted some talks to them. I haven't been to this conference before, and couldn't afford to send myself - but I took a look at last year's schedule and knew I …

I'm delighted (and somewhat stunned) to announce that I'll be speaking at php|tek in Chicago this May - you might also like to see the full timetable. This is one of the big events of the year and I was so desperate to attend that I gave the organisers a …

Last weekend saw a crowd descend on central Manchester in the UK for the first PHP North West conference. We had almost 180 attendees, 12 sessions, 16 speakers, and lots of fun. The day itself went off very smoothly and although I didn't manage to see many of the sessions …

Speaking at conferences is a great way to share ideas and meet people - but actually getting the opportunity to do is a little more tricky and usually involves proposing a talk. In the last year I've attended IPC in Germany and PHP London, spoken at DPC in Amsterdam, submitted talks …

|image1|In a month's time I'll be in Manchester, ready for the PHP North West conference. The conference is a one-day event (Saturday, 22nd November), although the social side of things will kick off the night before. Tickets are 50 GBP for the early bird, 35 GBP for students and …

Tickets are now on sale for PHPNW - the PHP Conference in Manchester, UK, on November 22nd. This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets …

Today saw the publication of the schedule for the PHP North West Conference - you can see it in full on their site. There are some great speakers lined up - Johannes Schlüter, Rob Allen and Stefan Koopmanschap to name just a few that immediately jump out of the page. Tickets aren't …

With just over a week remaining on the PHP North West Call for Papers, plans for this Manchester-based conference are fairly racing along. The call for papers closes on 21st September (in time for me arriving home from ZendCon so we can make some decisions before I shoot off again …

Yay! The PHPNW site is now online with all the details of the PHP North West Conference to be held on November 22nd, 2008 in Manchester, UK. The conference is specific to PHP and aims to develop the skills of the developers in the local area. Look out for local …

I'm wildly excited to be able to tell you that the PHP North West Conference now has a date and venue confirmed! The event will be at Manchester Central (apparently this used to be the GMex), on Saturday 22nd November with an early bird ticket price of £50. At the …

Well, its a misleading title because the day is only half over but the Dutch PHP Conference 2008 is well and truly underway! Today I've been in the Zend Framework tutorial given by Matthew Weir O'Phinney, which is a full-day session. Its been excellent - with some concepts, some examples, and …

I don't spend a lot of time hanging around with geeks in the real world. I spend a lot of time hanging around with them in virtual spaces and some of the people I have met there are my closest friends. Offline meets are ... quite different. Lots of geeks are …

A quick announcement: I'm speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference this year, my talk is entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion". The conference is in Amsterdam, you can find out more on its website http://phpconference.nl, and it takes place on June 14th. It'll be my first big speaking engagement …

Whenever I attend a conference or other geeky gathering (GeekUp for example) I'm often asked for my card ... but I don't have one. I don't have work business cards, because only sales people need those, and I don't have personal ones because I don't freelance (or not usually). I finally …

On Feburary 29th the PHP London 2008 conference will take place in London. Things have been very busy for the guys organising, there have been a few tweaks to the schedule but its looking like things are coming together nicely. I'm all set and have booked tickets and a hotel …

After the fun I had last year at PHPLondon, I'm happy to announce that I'll be there this year as well. The talks are pretty much finalised, the schedule is online and all that's left is for everyone to get tickets and I'll see you there!