#phpsw conference ideas

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi everyone,

On Wednesday night, we had a light-hearted discussion about running our own PHP conference. It isn't the first time this has come up on an evening. I thought it would be a good idea to get a discussion going here about it.

I think Lloyd summed it up best on Twitter when he said we'd discussed doing something that involved a lot of drinking with some PHP included :) The UK already has two large (and very successful) PHP conferences, and instead of doing more of the same, there's probably room for us to organise something closer to an Unconference; something that's highly social, and interactive / hands-on.

What does everyone think? Is there enough interest amongst us to put in the hours required to run a successful event between us? What sort of event would you love to see here in the South West?

Best regards,
Stu
Stu

[Ade]

An unconference would be superb. I agree that we shouldn't do more of
the same.

I'd certainly be interested in helping out. Although maybe I ought to
work on making the monthly meetings first!

Do you think we'd get a decent enough attendance external to the group
for anything we organised? Or is that something we make happen?

Cheers,
Ade

[Gary Hockin]

I love the idea of an unconference as well, being from Swansea making the meetings of a Wednesday evening is really difficult, but I'd still be very interested in helping to organise a conference.

Gary

[Lloyd]

Hey Stu,

Obviously happy to get involved in this, I organise a couple of
charity events myself so hopefully some of that should help here.

With regards to subjects, maybe more of a workshop based conference
would be a good idea, with a talk followed by practical demonstrations
(e.g. load testing, server setup, performance, "how to write an app in
20 minutes, etc). I often find with talks that the tech is very cool
and its something I'd like to use, but unless it solves a problem for
me I'm not going to go out and attempt to use it. Would possibly be
useful to hear from testers, programmers from other languages an awful
lot can be looked at by looking at other languages/solutions.

Might also be interesting to hook up with a related group (again
testing/QA comes to mind I'm afraid) in order to increase our appeal
and beer money draw :)

Cheers, Lloyd.

On Mar 11, 5:04 pm, Stuart Herbert <stuart.herb...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Lloyd,

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Lloyd <lloyd...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Obviously happy to get involved in this, I organise a couple of
charity events myself so hopefully some of that should help here.

:)

 

With regards to subjects, maybe more of a workshop based conference
would be a good idea, with a talk followed by practical demonstrations
(e.g. load testing, server setup, performance, "how to write an app in
20 minutes, etc).

Yes, I agree.

Do you think it would be useful if we structured the day so that you went from workshop to workshop building up an app as you went along?  Each workshop would focus on a different aspect of the app development process, helping people see how it all ties together.

 

Might also be interesting to hook up with a related group (again
testing/QA comes to mind I'm afraid) in order to increase our appeal
and beer money draw :)

Hehe.  I think hooking up with a related group has a lot of appeal.  What groups are there out here in the South West?

Best regards,

Stu
--
Stuart Herbert

e: stu...@stuartherbert.com
t: +44 7966 284577
w: http://www.stuartherbert.com/
b: http://blog.stuartherbert.com/

[Daniel Morgan]

Hello people, 

I am not sure what the etiquette is for new members, but i signed up to the list recently and I just wanted to say hi. I am in South Wales so I believe still within the catchment area of the group, though it is going to be a mission to get to meetings but I am going to try. I would be very interested in attending some kind of a conference, and ending up on the list after searching for a more localised conference.

Kind Regards

Daniel Morgan

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Daniel,

Welcome to the group :)  We definitely welcome folks from across the bridge, and there's quite a few of us on the mailing list who shuttle back and forth across the bridge to work in England.

Best regards,

Stu

--

--

[Lloyd]

> Do you think it would be useful if we structured the day so that you went
> from workshop to workshop building up an app as you went along?  Each
> workshop would focus on a different aspect of the app development process,
> helping people see how it all ties together.

I think that's a great idea although we'll have to be very careful
when planning what the application should be and its scope (i.e. keep
the application so simple it could be knocked up within 2 - 3 hours
at most). We also need to be sure that the application covers as many
areas as possible but whilst still allowing it to be a good candidate
for the aspects of the development process/tasks that we choose.
Something released to production at the event and kept running for a
good while longer would also be awesome and an excellent challenge to
boot.

Some ideas:
- Version control (SVN, GIT, Mg)
- Web server technologies (Apache, Cherokee, Nginx, Light HTTP, Hip
hop?)
- Database technologies (mySQL, oracle, Mongo, CouchDB, mySQL off
shoots)
- Server technologies (shared hosting, dedicated hosting, rackspace
cloud, EC2)
- Unit testing, TDD
- Code quality, clean code, working with legacy code ( -- why do
these things? messy procedural code is much faster ;) )
- Development tools (xdebug, xprofile, kcachegrind, IDEs, Virtual
Servers, code tracing, PHP Mess Detector, Copy/Paste detector)
- Performance testing/tuning (CDN, LAMP stack tuning)
- Code optimisations (APC, include paths, may be involve some
framework tuning?)
- Frameworks (which, why, advantages/disadvantages, ones to watch out
for, what's happening in the world of frameworks)
- Design patterns, code tools (dependency injection, IOC)
- Caching (Memcached, file cache, APC, alternatives)
- Deployment mechanisms
- DB server tuning, improving queries
- Node JS
- JavaScript libraries
- HTML5

> Hehe.  I think hooking up with a related group has a lot of appeal.  What
> groups are there out here in the South West?

The only groups I can think of would be testers or designers, or maybe
a group from other programming languages? I'm not aware of other
scenes, but I'm sure some of our members could suggest something :)

Cheers, Lloyd.

[Lloyd]

Came across these guys this evening, http://uxbristol.org.uk/ , might
be worth hooking up and following their patten?

[Stuart Herbert]

/me nods. With more beer, I hope ;)

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:47 PM, Lloyd <lloyd...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Came across these guys this evening, http://uxbristol.org.uk/ , might
be worth hooking up and following their patten?