Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

I’m sitting here in a session at DrupalCamp Nashville on the Vandy campus. The day has been great and the Nashville Drupelars should be commended for running such a great camp. From a conference organizer PoV, this camp has run smoothly. The Wi-Fi is rock solid, the sessions start on time and the topics have been interesting.

Bluecoast Burrito catered lunch and it was great. Not only was the food good but there was no waiting on them to replenish the food.

The facility, Owen Graduate School of Management, on the Vanderbilt campus is a great venue for events less than 150. The rooms are nice and there is power at almost every seat.

As with any camp, the speakers are a mixed bag. I have truly enjoyed several of the sessions and learned some interesting new things about Drupal. There have been however, some not so good sessions and at leat one #epochFail. That’s what you get when you go to a camp. I love that aspect, even if it means I sit through a bad session or two.

All in all though, today has been a great day. Thanks Jamie!

Until next time,
I <3 |<
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Dear Reader,

Today was the day! Podcamp Nashville 2010, downtown Nashville at the Cadillac Ranch. As always with the Nashville camps, overall it was great experience. The sessions were quality with speakers like Mitch Canter and Kate Gallagher. It was great to meet some new friends and catch up with some old ones.
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Dear Reader,

Wow, what a day today was!

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post so unless you are friend or family, you may just want to read the next summary and skip the rest.

For those in a hurry

For those who have not heard, yes, I will soon be leaving Zend and moving to Ibuildings. Yes, that means I am also leaving Nashville, TN-US for Utrecht, Netherlands. No, the lovely and talented Kathy will not be going with me immediately but will be joining me after my son graduates high school. Yes we are both very excited about it.

Why

The first question most people ask me is why? I mean a lot of people asked me that. As I’ve said to just about anyone who would listen, I have a great job! Zend is a great company to work for, they provide for their people, and I have absolutely no complaints about my time at Zend. This will come as a surprise to a few Zenders as all they have ever seen me do is complain. I’ve been allowed to create my role at Zend and that is a rare thing at any company.

I was originally hired at Zend to be an editor for DevZone and I was just supposed to write articles and code. (those of you who have seen my spelling and grammar gaffes can stop laughing now) Over the course of 2.5 years, Mark de Visser, with the backing of Andi, Harold and the rest of this awesome company, put up with my antics. They paid me to work with the PHP community. I got to travel to conferences, hang out in IRC, they even let me be the Master of Ceremonies of ZendCon. This truly is a dream job. It is so great that in the 2.5 years, I’ve turned down most offers to interview and the few serious offers that came my way. This was were I felt at home.

So back to the question, why leave a dream job at a great company? The only answer I have is “opportunity“. Most of you have never read my article “Nerd Herding” (and I don’t recommend you bother now) but in it I talk about the fact that for developers, interesting projects are just as important as a good salary. While I still love what I do at Zend, the opportunity offered to me by Ibuildings was just too great to pass up. So that is why, after over a month of thinking about it and discussing it with the lovely and talented Kathy, we decided that this was a chance I couldn’t pass up.

/me <3 PHPC

One of the great things about my job, both at Zend and at Ibuildings is that I get paid to work with the PHP community. I told someone this at ZendCon but it bears repeating here.

PHP is my fifth programming language, that means I’ve been a part of 5 programming communities. None of those communities have come close to being as vibrant, fun and welcoming as the PHP community. PHP developers should not take this community for granted, it is something special.

It is to this awesome group of mixed nuts that we call the PHP community, that I give a big hug and say thank you. Thank you for all the tweets, blog posts, IMs and irc well wishes today. Thank you for your friendship. Thanks you for welcoming me in even when you didn’t have to. You guys and gals are teh awesome and I wish I could call each of you by name and say thank you. (if I tried, we’d be here a while an even then, I know I’d leave someone out so I’m not going to try) It has been a blast working with you while at Zend and I look forward to working with you at Ibuildings!

Looking Forward

I’ve talked a lot about Zend in this post but I can’t close without saying a big hello to my new Ibuildings family. Thank you for welcoming me in such a warm fashion. I’ve never had this much attention paid to me coming to a new company. Honestly, it humbles me to think that I’m moving to a new company and country and yet I already have good friends in both. I am looking forward to working with each of you!

I am positive that Zend will be hiring someone to take over DevZone and my other duties. I know that phpc will embrace them as you did me. (because again, you guys and gals rock!) DevZone has become a regular daily stop of a lot of PHP developers and I am sure it will only get better.

As for me? well, I’m not going anywhere. (figuratively speaking) I’ll still be hanging around on Skype, IRC and IM. If you need to contact me, my contact info is always on my EPK. I encourage you to ping me if I can help you.

It’s been an awesome 2.5 years at Zend and I look forward to a number of awesome years at Ibuildings!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
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Dear Reader,

Tonight I was invited to attend the Nashville Technology Council’s panel discussion titled “Using Social Networking to Increase ROI”. Merrell Ligons invited me to attend as he was on the panel. Also on the panel were Jon Henshaw of Sitening and my buddy Marcus Whitney of Remarkable Wit.

I’ll be honest, when I saw the topic of discussion I did a double take. After all, this was hosted by NTC. NTC is mostly old-school tech in Nashville and for them, this was pretty darned progressive.

I arrived, networked, was pleased to reconnect with old acquaintances like Jerry Dunlop and made a few new friends.

The panel discussion started promptly at 4:30ish. Now call me new-fashioned if you like but a panel discussion on Social Networking that simply has a moderator asking the panelists questions, kinda misses the point of Social Networking totally.(My friend Janet Lee Johnson seems to agree with me.) It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes that the audience was allowed a few questions. After so many *Camps, UnCons and such, this was almost surreal.

Anyhow, Merrel, Jon and Marcus were really the three panelists with clues, they made us proud. Of the others, one was a recruiter who admitted that his sole interaction with Social Networking was LinkedIn, the owner of a software company who felt that their website software that they sold to customers was “Social Networking applied” (um, not) and someone whom I believe was at the director level running a software development team.

There were 2 defining moments for me in the discussion, one good, one bad.

1. Merrell made a statement to the effect of “From a business standpoint social networking is about listening” I liked it so much I tweeted it. Merrell gets it and is a credit to his employer. (I’m looking at you News Channel 5) A lot of people think that business have to get out on the net and talk. I’m putting the finishing touches on a paper and this is one of the main points. If you want ROI on your Social Networking efforts, shut up and listen!
2. One of the panelist talked about the fact that they were interviewing someone for a job once and the interviewee had researched both the company and the interviewer to the point that the interviewee had read an article about the interviewer from “quite some time ago”. This “creeped” the interviewer out and they shut down the interview at that point. Honest to god, I almost screamed. Here this person, wanting the job, had taken the time to do research on the company and the interviewer. To take the time to get to know who they were talking to and gets punished because of it. Oh well, it’s companies like that that keep me in business helping other companies find developers. I usually get my best developers from companies without a clue.

Thanks again Merrell for the invite. It was great to get out and meet some local IT people. Honestly though, I think the Geek Breakfast crowd is much more my speed.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
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