Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: -7
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:14
Cities left: 7
Miles Traveled: 0
Cups of Coffee: 0
Current Current City: London

Random Stat of the Day

Current Slide Count:92

Prep Work

Today’s presentation included adding a couple of code oriented slides to my “Design Patterns” talk. I felt that 50+ slides weren’t enough to keep you amused while I ramble. I may sneak in a few slides showing past articles from this blog if I can’t find anything else to show. I’ve got 60 minutes to fill and so far I’m only at 55. :)

People I’m looking forward to catching up with

I’m looking forwarding to spending some time with my buddies Sebastian, Stefan and Arne of thePHP.cc. Of the three, I’ve known Sebastian the longest. I met him at my very first PHP conference, php|works which took place someplace in Canada. (Apologies to my Canadian subscribers, I’m sure one of you will leave a polite comment letting us all know where it took place)

When I say I “met” Sebastian, I am using the term loosely. The PHP community has 2 subcultures, Beer and Photography, Sebastian is one of the leaders in the photography subculture and I “met” Sebastian when he saw my speaker badge and instantly snapped a head shot for his collection. (It should be noted for all future conference coordinators, Sebastian has the best collection of head shots of PHP speakers, world wide of anyone I’ve seen. Usually he will let you use one if you ask.)

Sebastian is of course best known for his work on PHPUnit. PHPUnit is a testing framework that I’ve had the chance to work with exactly once but I didn’t hate it nearly as much as I thought I would.

Sebastian, Stefan and Arne travel Europe teaching PHP in a very unique way. I’ve only heard descriptions of their PHP Camps but from what I gather, they seem to combine elements of university lecturing and a three ring circus. (Complete with elePHPant)

These three guys pretty much own the tutorial day with all three doing “Code Review” in the morning and then each giving a separate tutorial in the afternoon. I’ve seen the victims of their code reviews lying injured along the roads leading out of php|tek, it’s fun to watch, unless it’s your code. :)

I’m looking forward to spending time catching up with the 3 of them and finding out how thePHP.cc is going. I love the fact that the PHP community is small enough so that a lot of us get to know each other pretty well and help each other out when they can. Since they are successfully building a company, I’m going to pick their brains about what worked and what didn’t work as I start to promote Box Lunch Training.

This is going to be a fun trip.

Until next time,

=C=

p.s. If you are going to CodeWorks, make sure you look Sebastian, Stefan and Arne up and say thanks for being a CodeWorks sponsor. They helped pay part of your ticket price. :)

Tags: Arne Blankerts, codeworks, cw09, PHP, phpunit, Sebastian Bergmann, Stefan Priebsch, the php company

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under codeworks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.