Rebecca Murphey – host of the yayquery podcast‘ – will be presenting “Retooling Your Workflow (Or: Git + Tickets = Happiness)” at indieconf. Register today to come learn from Rebecca and the other speakers about taking your freelancing business to the next level.
Archive for the ‘Conferences’ category
indieconf meet the speakers – Rebecca Murphey
August 19th, 2010Web freelancer conference
July 21st, 2010indieconf – the conference for independent web professionals – is now open for registation.
What is indieconf? It’s a conference that brings together the topics that affect freelance web people with experts who’ve been there and done that. I’ve attended a number of tech/web conferences over the past 12 years or so, and while they’ve all been ‘good’, there’s usually very little in the way of information that helps me in the business side of my work. As an independent, there’s questions about bookkeeping, outsourcing, legal issues, time management, billing, sales and marketing, and more that don’t typically get addressed at the typical tech conference. And at ‘small business’ events (conferences, networking meetings, etc), there tend to be very few ‘web geeks’ who speak my own language and understand the particular challenges that I face.
So, from that quandary, indieconf was born.
I’ve been contemplating this for a while, focused the idea some, and have been working for the past 6 weeks organizing a core set of speakers/sessions, location, paperwork, and more ‘stuff’ that goes on with a conference. I’m not even half done, but have been having a great time so far. I think we’ve got a pretty solid line up of speakers and sessions so far, although we’ve got room for a few more (planning between 15 and 18, and we’ve got about 9 or 10 nailed down).
One of the things I’ve tried to do with this is to get speakers from outside the Raleigh area. Right now we’ve got speakers from California, Texas and Pennsylvania as well as the Raleigh area and the Carolina coast. Even people who’ve been to many local or regional events in the NC area likely won’t have crossed paths with all of these speakers, which I hope is seen as a good thing (I think it is!).
So whether you’re a PHP guru just starting out freelancing, a PSD master who’s been at it for years, or someone just considering getting in to the world of freelance web work, I think indieconf will have something for you. With that said, what are some other types of sessions/info you’d like to get out of a conference like this? I’ve got some more topics planned based on early feedback from people, and would like to take on a bit more before making more decisions.
I look forward to seeing you in Raleigh this November at indieconf!
Charlotte Code Camp ideas
October 10th, 2009I’m presenting my “PHP On Windows” again, this time at Charlotte Code Camp today. I’ve got the unenviable position of following Chris Love and Joe Walling, each of whom have presented great business-oriented presentations on being entrepreneurial with software. They’ve both got me thinking about a lot of things, and I wish they wouldn’t, because it makes me lose focus on the few things I should be focusing on! But still, definitely some great ideas happening here. If I get a chance, I’ll post some of the ideas here, but I might not be able to find the time.
PHP On Windows – presentation slides
September 19th, 2009I gave a talk today at the Raleigh Code Camp titled “PHP On Windows”. It was decently attended, given the attendee focus at a Microsoft-sponsored event. MS has been embracing PHP much more publicly over the last year or so, and I reviewed some of the steps they’ve been taking (auto-install on IIS7, recent bytecode cache from MS, etc). The slides I used were relatively sparse, as some of the presentation was simply doing some code on Windows.
I will probably expand on this talk and may give it again at some point. If you have any good resources or info about PHP on Windows, let me know.
Lost art of simplicity
July 1st, 2009I had the pleasure of seeing Josh Holmes keynote CodeStock Saturday morning. His presentation, “The Lost Art of Simplicity,” was very well done. Very broad topic, but very applicable to likely everyone in the room. Certainly I took away many good points. In some ways, it’s a lot of points that we *know* at an academic level, but not points that we’ve necessarily internalized and made part of the standard development process. He brought up an example of corporate users copying Access databases around via email, and he asked “what is the *truth* at that point” – meaning which is the ‘master’ data? This echoed my NADS post from some years ago – when you copy spreadsheets around, you end up with a Non-Authoritative Data Source problem. 
The talk was aimed at getting developers to simplify, rather than write complex systems. Occasionally I have the opposite problem, with clients wanting more complex systems than it seems they actually need. There’s 20 processes in place when 8 would do, but simplifying the organization’s workflow to scale down to 8 processes would take more effort than just replicating the 20 processes in a computerized system. I have to say this ends up being the most frustrating position to be in, and I tend to want to not get involved in those projects. Sometimes I’ve been able to avoid those projects, but not always.
“Enterprise is a code word for complexity”. He metioned Twitter getting 15k transactions per second before deciding to move to a second server. I wish he’d also mentioned that it’s done in Ruby, just to drive home the point that dynamic languages *can* scale. I think he was going in that direction, but then stopped.
Josh’s talk seemed to get some good reactions from the attendees, and certainly gave us all a lot to think about. Although this is primarily a MS-based conference, Josh’s avoidance of an MS-specific talk was a welcome gesture. I suspect he’s given this talk to a variety of developer audiences regardless of background – it certainly fits. If you’ve got a chance to go hear Josh speak, take it. He’s a hugely knowledgeable person who’s also one of the friendliest guys I’ve had the chance of meeting at a conference in the past few years (we first met at the first CodeMash in 2007).
Traveling around a bit – Denmark May 18, 19, 20
May 17th, 2009I’ve been in London most of the last week, and had a great time meeting up with people (DylanS and Sam from the Dojo project, Rajat from Yahoo, some locals putting on a minibarcamp, and others). I’ve done some video and audio of some of these meetings and hope to put them up someplace in the next week or so.
I can’t sleep, have a cold, and am catching a taxi to Heathrow in the next 30 minutes, so I figured I’d just post this quick update here. I’m heading to the GR8 conference in Denmark this morning, and should be there by noonish. If you’re in Copenhagen on Wednesday and care to meet for lunch, let me know. I’ve got no firm plans at this point, and don’t leave Copenhagen until Wed evening (6pm I think). Would love to meet up with some web people from Denmark (PHP, Grails, Ruby, CF, Java, C#, ASP.NET, Flash – even JavaFX!)
Speaking at Codestock
June 15th, 2008Exciting news – I’ll be presenting an introduction to Grails at the upcoming Codestock conference in Knoxville this August! The site doesn’t have full details yet, but I was just notified this morning that my submission was accepted. I’d actually submitted 3 options – my SOLR presentation, a “Continuous Integration with PHP” topic, and an introduction to Grails. The Grails topic was selected.
I’d like to thank Alan Stevens for the invitation to submit in the first place. I was a bit hesitant at first because the conference seemed very .net oriented. It’s being sponsored by the area .net user group, which makes sense. Alan let me know that they were looking for cross-platform topics, not just .net ones. However, it seems I may be the only topic that’s not directly related to Microsoft technologies. James Avery is presenting “10 Open Source tools you should use” – not sure if those are 10 tools in general, or 10 tools aimed at Windows developers (either way, I’m sure he’ll have a good list!). There’s another presentation on Mono and ASP.net. I’m the only Java-based presentation though. I hope it’s not too much of a ‘fish out of water’ thing.
WebDevRadio podcast series – Interview with Brian Moon on scaling LAMP
May 3rd, 2008This is the last in my MySQL conference series. Brian Moon, author of Phorum and Sr Developer at Dealnews.com, sat down and gave a recap of his two presentations. We have here nearly a full hour of his insights in to PHP/MySQL scalability, both with an app like Phorum and a more complex environment like Dealnews. The sound was pretty good, although there was a hum in the background I tried to get rid of via ‘noise removal’. I think this still sounds decent. Let me know if the sound is too awkward and I’ll give it another pass if need be.
Thanks to Brian for going over things in such detail! I hardly asked any questions, as I was trying to soak up as much as possible for myself, and I picked up more than a few useful nuggets. He also touched on the future of the PHP//MySQL combination with the MyQSLnd (“next driver”? I forget now!) driver being developed. There’s some great info in here – listen up!
Also, as a reminder, if you have any job postings for your company, please help build up the WebDevRadio Jobs board at http://jobs.webdevradio.com, and thanks to the first few posters who’ve helped get things rolling.
New WebDevRadio podcast up – SilverStripe CMS interview
April 26th, 2008SilverStripe is a PHP5-based CMS from down under (New Zealand!). I had a chance to meet with Sigurd Magnusson, one of the project’s founders, and discuss the project’s history, current status as an open source project (BSD-licensed), and where it’s heading. Have a listen!
Blob Streaming with MySQL
April 16th, 2008I’m sitting in on the Blob Streaming with MySQL session. The project is at http://blobstreaming.org. Coincidentally, my brother had put together a proof of concept for streaming blobs from MySQL a few months ago before either of us heard about this project.
Why to put blobs in a database? The biggest pro seems to be for transactional reasons. File systems directly aren’t always transactional. Also replication and HA solutions then get applied right to that data as well as the rest of your data.
Are there reasons to not put blobs in a database? They can make the table slow, the database can become too big to snapshot or backup (practically, if not in theory), and replication can be too slow. The blobstreaming.org project seems to alleviate the replication slowness problem. How? The blobstreaming project stores the blob data in the database, but not in the rowdata itself (which just holds a reference). The goodness of the database functionality is there, but the replications aren’t slowed down by the blob data. I think I’m getting this right…
Basically the BlobStreamer is another engine type, but it’s not a table type you can create directly – it has to hook in to another table type. The only one demoed is PBXT (blobstreaming was put together by PrimeBase as well, so this makes sense). Perhaps this would work with innodb as well…? The BS engine type exposes an HTTP interface as well for basic reading and writing of blob data.
An interesting project which may come in handy for some large file/video projects.
