Visit To PHP London

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at the PHP London group, giving a talk entitled “PHP Deployment with Subversion”. This is the talk I will be giving next week at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, and giving the same talk last night was the last step in a whole series of preparation for next week. (The slides will be available after the Dutch conference)

As ever it was great to get to the event and meet the people there, I don’t make it to the PHP London meetings very often but I always have a good time when I do. Although this talk was supposed to be a “test drive” for next week, I was actually very squeaky happy to get the invite to speak! Anyway the guys there were great as usual, helping me get set up with the projector, providing a pep talk, and buying me a beer afterwards.

The talk itself went fine, nothing more and nothing less. It was perfect for time, which is excellent as I had absolutely no idea how long I would talk for. I was greatly helped by using Powerpoint (yes, I had to boot into windows, scary!) with its Presenter View which has a timer. This view also shows you your current slide, the notes for this slide, and the upcoming slides which is all good (so long as you can read very tiny writing from standing 4 feet away from your laptop – happily I’m long-sighted!). The content I think is OK – lots of questions came out after the talk which was really interesting, and I certainly realised there were a few points that I need to mention when I give the talk again. The slides perhaps leave something to be desired, colours look different projected and there was a particularly horrible shade of yellow which appears on quite a few slides – oops!

I had a great night and although I wouldn’t say I’m feeling confident for next week, I feel like there are fewer unknowns. I also came to terms with the idea that feeling terrible about a talk is just not something I’m going to get over until I have done the talk – its all part of the preparation I guess.

9 thoughts on “Visit To PHP London

  1. The talk was great. It was my first time there and the impression was quite good. I think I am coming up more times for this and other meetup events to meet uo with the geek community.
    Just found this blog on the web and came back to lornaJane and say something: http://icecatseoul.blogspot.com/
    Yesterday night confused ibuildings with ibuilders… hehe. nevermind.
    Hmm, curious what cms you did use. Cannot find any CMS logo at the bottom of this page… I get curious very easy , I guess.
    Am also wondering how many people are running your company ]i[Buildings…
    The room was filled with a nice and positive energy. It seems everyone felt confortably to pose dozens of questions.

    I did not yet get hands yet on the .pdf of the recommended Subversion manual. These .torrents bundles downloadings are still less than perfect. Googlebooks doesnt seem to be the answer because of copyright. Scribz neither.

    Or is it me that doesn’t know the right tools and how to get .PDFs manuals easy and the fast way.

    These portguese geeks found a way of streaming the main TV station online only in portuguese territory and under the Telepac/Sapo proprietary isp networks. Wondering if someone could find a hack to be able to have http://www.sic.pt online streaming tv channels being been able to be seen worldwide.

    Acrobat.com is coming on the air. rock on
    let’s hope our wallets not suffer…

  2. Lorna: your observation is right, the anxiety only disappears once the talk is done, but, the more you do it, the shorter the period of anxiety before the talk (now I only start to worry during breakfast on the day itself :)).

    Daniel, to answer your Ibuildings questions, we use our own WDE CMS which is based on the ATK framework. The company is about 60 people, and to answer your question about how many run it: the MT is about 5 people, one of which is me (so if you have any questions, drop me a mail at ivo at ibuildings dot com).

    I also like the phplondon meetings very much, even though I’ve been to only 2 so far. But everytime I happen to be in london and there is a meeting, I’ll be there.

  3. Ivo: well, I’m still pretty nervous so you can expect a fair amount of “Whose idea was this anyway??” between now and Saturday :) Still, I think I’ve done most of the right things in preparation which can only help even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.

  4. I thought you came across well and the nerves seemed to disappear pretty much straight away.. after you mentioned you might be nervous :) IMHO, I would drop this initial bit about saying you might be nervous, everyone accepts that this happens and before you know it, you are halfway through the talk.

    Consistently remembered to repeat the question so others could here what was being asked.. so that’s good. Firm answers when being questioned about something as well.

    You will be fine. Hope you enjoy it. :)

  5. Paul: Interesting advice, initially I felt quite strongly about pointing out that I’m a frightened geek although I might not look like one! But maybe I should just get up there and get on with it …

  6. Oh no, I’ve missed it :( Deployment is always a great topic to discuss and there’s always something new to learn. Do you know who organized this last meeting? Was it the guys at IPC media?

  7. Today I leave for Amsterdam, to visit the Dutch PHP Conference where I will be getting my first experience as a conference speaker. It would be fair to say that I’m very nervous – its a high profile event and the other speakers in the lineup are pretty a

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