Strength in Unity
PHPWomen are featured in the December issue of the php|architect magazine, we’re the subject of this month’s /etc column! If you aren’t already a subscriber - then go and check out the options, they even have a free issue offer so there are no excuses 
At the recent PHPNW conference, PHPWomen met a new friend, Tess Barnes. She has been kind enough to write about her experiences and share them with us.
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Up until November 2008 I was a conference virgin: no jollies, no hotel booking panic and no development talks. As I’ve been self employed as a website developer for three years I decided it was about time to break the mould, invest the profits and head up to Manchester. Working from home with a small group of local customers can lead to an insular perspective and feeling in a rut, surely the best thing to do is get together with like minded professions? Of course, it seems so obvious but it still took me three years to get there!
So why did it take so long? The first thing most people think of is money; yes conferences can be expensive, but you can make it cheaper if you share cars, book buses in advance, go for b&b or find a friends sofa. Another usual barrier is picking the most relevant event to go to, there’s so many to choose from and some days they all seem to be in the US. Actually my initial stumbling block was finding out about conferences in the first place. Reading the ‘right resources’ will give you a window onto the whole spectrum of geekups, barcamps, lugs, php*s, but what if you don’t know the ‘right resources’? Twitter helped, following everyone featured in the following list of respected friends was a good start and adding feeds such as Planet PHP and A List Apart to my RSS reader was a huge leg-up too.
So armed with the right information all I had to do was book and figure out how to afford it? Almost - I also had to get over the fear.
I dealt with a few assumptions:
1) I didn’t know anyone, (apart from the lovely person giving me a lift)
2) I didn’t know anything,
3) As soon as I opened my mouth I was going to make myself look a fool.
By following the excellent pre conference run up on twitter and the conference site itself I found out about other people who were going, what they were interested in or looking forward to and where they were travelling from. I picked out talks I wanted to go to and made time to go to the socials - quite easy as a freelance but planning ahead can also help make this
possible for the employed too.
Forcing myself to speak to complete strangers brought me up against assumptions 2 and 3. In the end I found the simplest thing to do was to admit I didn’t know how much PHP I knew and say I was there to learn and meet people who knew more. Just let me say this was a good move! By being open to new ideas and admitting I didn’t know as much as I wanted to automatically I avoided looking too much of a fool. Not drinking too much on the Friday night helped but I cannot recommend enough the power of being honest.
I even got the chance to meet some of the speakers and kill an assumption I didn’t even know I had – they are all very approachable rather than the stuffy elitists I thought they might be.
Once I’d arrived and got over the Friday night social jitters it was time for the actual conference. Although I’ve not been to an event like this before, I’ve heard plenty of horror stories: lost registrations, badly signed venues, schedules run amok and tedious talks. I’m so pleased to say PHPNW08 was none of that!
The whole venue was well signed – from street to seat, the registration staff and crew were friendly and helpful. the schedule was clearly posted and appeared in the goodie bag. Talks started on time and were thoroughly engaging. Sadly, some talks (particularly the HTML to Drupal) had little time for questions but everything I attended was well worth going to. If anyone is interested there is a list of the talks I attended at the end of the article.
It was a very full day of intense concentration punctuated by fresh air and coffee but unbelievably worth it. The talks weren’t the only reason for going of course, I wanted to make contact with members of PHPWomen in real life, find out who on earth the talented and vocal LornaJane is, take a look at exhibition stands, complete a brainbench test, see a demo of the Zend Framework, talk to recruiters and even come home with offers of new work! Completely unrealistically long
list of things to achieve as it turns out
I have come away from my first conference with a whole new raft of assumptions:
- I don’t know as much as I want to about PHP, MySQL, HTML5, frameworks, testing, security….
- There are loads of resources out there on the web and in my local area to learn more or meet up with geeks like me such as PHPWomen, phpWM, whatwg, and freelance switch.
- I didn’t miss out on everything just because I wasn’t glued to irc all day
- Freelancing is a wonderful way to work
- I’m actually more of a front end developer
- Women can get exactly where they want to in the industry with hard work and determination (just like anyone else) Lorna and Johanna are just two of the successful developers that I had the chance to meet.
- The absolute best way to kick yourself out of a jaded rut is to get out and meet people, go to a conference, geekup, barcamp, php group in your area (or out of your area for a change)
- phpNW08 was the best choice for a first conference, no question. It was well run, open, friendly, and fired up my enthusiasm for the community and industry where I now feel at home.
I owe all that to the fabulous people behind PHPNW08, organisers and sponsors. A huge thank you to Jeremy
(phpcodemonkey) for taking the gamble, the crew for keeping it all running so smoothly, Lorna and Johanna for inviting me
into the PHPWomen fold, Smylers for being unfailingly enthusiastic and to Stuart for driving.
I attended (and surprised myself by understanding):
Welcome Keynote: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Derick Rethans
Highlighting techniques we all forget in the great web2.0 takeover such as URLs that make human sense and the real place for spaghetti
First Steps with Zend Framework
Rob Allen
An excellent introduction to a sensible alternative to Notebook ++ and indicated just how much I don’t know about frameworks and php development.
From HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes
James Panton & Chris Maiden
A brave and successful live coding based talk that embraced visual teaching rather than discussing abstracts. I’m still not sure about Drupal but I liked the approach.
HTML 5: What’s that all about?
Smylers
Hugely energetic and enthusiastic talk by someone who knows and
obviously feels passionately about their subject. Most of my post-PHPNW
research so far has been around HTML5, standards and CSS.
Twittex: From idea to live in 7 days
Stuart Herbert
As a freelancer I find I also need to know about the commercial world, cost, promotion and planning. It was great to hear about the development of a new service in the wider business context.
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Tess also sent over some photos to share of her day
Thanks Tess!!
The new eposiode of Sun’s SDN (Sun Developer Network) features phpwomen.org! I spent a few minutes chatting on the phone with Cassandra from SDN and she recorded it so she could share with her listeners - you can find the podcast at http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/introduction_to_phpwomen_org plus there is other interesting tech content so have a click around!
While at ZendCon I stole some time from the schedule of Lise Driggers, one of the female attendees I met there, to ask her a bit about herself and how she got to where she is today. Lise works for Timptech in Vancouver, migrating their existing i-series applications (also known as AS400 or “green screen”) to flex, using PHP to communicate between PHP and the database.
How did you get started with PHP?
My background is in midrange programming in RPG. I took a class at a community college and got a couple of books on PHP, this enabled me to work on the migration project when it came up at work. Originally I was studying computer science, but when I ran out of money I took a programming job - and here I am.
What was the path you took between running out of money as a student and the job you hold today?
I worked on the midrange machines, and then I had two long career breaks to stay home with my children when they were young. The first break was 8 years, and the next was 5 years - I returned two years ago, and I’m 48 now.How did you find returning to work after a break?
Technology and tools move on! I found I needed to refresh my skills, remember what I knew and also find out what had changed. I was very lucky to have a mentor to see me through updating my skills. My mentor was someone I already knew from a previous job, and this helped me find the confidence to return to work in the first place - especially as I had previously been told I should not return as I would not understand the work.Do you interact with the PHP Community much?
I’ve been to the PDX PHP Group, the first time I went they thought I was lost! But now I bake cupcakes and cookies to take when I go.
Do you have time for other hobbies too?
Yes, I’m a crafter! I enjoy lace making and knitting.In fact I spotted Lise knitting in a keynote, here’s a photo of her
knitting and my crochet project (and the elephpant).
At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled “Women in IT”. In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP. We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded - the audio can be found at:
http://www.phpwomen.org/wordpress/uploads/PHPW_uncon.mp3
Juliette shared some interesting links with us, pages and conversations that had given her the motivation to run a session like this and examine the issues - in particular http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/02/23/diverse-it-gets/
We’ve also set up a forum thread for us to discuss this further - so feel free to drop in there and add your thoughts. Finally, here’s an overview of the main points of the session, in case your headphones aren’t handy:
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We kicked off the session with agreement that women in IT is a good thing. Then we looked in more detail at the pros and cons
Women in IT is not a good thing because:
- sexism wouldn’t be an issue if the women weren’t there
- men become more competitive with the women around, not in a good way
- women make it harder for a team to communicate, because some men don’t know how to talk to them
- women with kids can have “emergencies” - so more work for everyone else
- women sometimes get jobs on “affirmative action”/”positive discrimintation” grounds
Women in IT/PHP is good because:
- women make the men more civilised and better behaved
- women have an alternative perspective
- women have more empathy with the user experience
- better for business
- women are good team players
- women are more conscienscious and pay attention to detail
- women smell better
There was agreement that most guys are fine and there is just the occassional bad apple - but that this can put women off for life. We discussed how hard it is for outsiders to intervene in a situation where a woman is getting a hard time from someone else. The women are usually strong personalities, and can be slightly uptight about guys coming in and “rescuing” them. The guys who are seeing it happening will have difficulty identifying when to step in or even that there is an issue at all.
We identified issues with women not putting themselves forward unless they feel they are *better* than others, where men do it when they feel they are *as good*. The men are more comfortable with “blowing their own trumpet” about what they have been doing, whereas women may consider it to be all in a day’s work. When conferences are selecting speakers, they need to see the speaking/writing this particular person has been doing, so it must be easy to find. We also discussed how women are often raised to be modest and supportive - and often they don’t realise how much self-promotion is done by men that they need to compete with.
Elizabeth mentioned that one of the purposes of phpwomen is to mentor more women - and show them the steps to promote themselves. The organisation publishes when calls for papers are happening, and helps show newcomers how to prepare their abstract, bio, and so on. Some colleges teach public speaking, but not everyone has that experience or takes these opportunities when they are optional. Men need this just as much as women do to become speakers too, this is not a gender-specific issue.
Women tend not to study computer science, its not really culturally acceptable and the profession isn’t appealing - so they don’t ever try it, they’re never exposed to code. Its completely normal for women to never write a line of code, not all teachers/parents are able to let youngsters try these things out.
We all took turns to say the ways we will help support women in IT/PHP:
- Go to phpwomen, answer forum questions, helps men and women (public forum).
- Mentorship program - we have big sisses and little sisses, people will grow to nuture new joiners
- Go into schools and show the girls that software is *creative*
- Answer questions and support people on the IRC channel
- Women could be submitting talks and/or having presence at geek events
- Conference/User group organisers: invite and encourage female speakers
- Accept candidates for work experience, including women/girls
- Encourage women to write for forum or c7y
- Support women in the workplace
We also noted that almost all the bad experiences have almost all been in workplaces - not in the development community.
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Thanks to Juliette for running the session!
Get the cake and pop the champagne; it’s birthday time! 2 years have gone by and we’ve seen wonderful things from our group. Some of the things we’ve worked on this past year include:
Representation at conferences. We continue to get the word out by popping up at various PHP and open source conferences, including php|tek, OSCON, PHP London, Dutch PHP Conference, and ZendCon. We will also have a presence at php|works and PHPNW conferences. Exposure at conferences has been wonderful for getting the word out about the group and our mission, and we look forward to continuing this trend next year. As well, this year at ZendCon we held an unconference session to discuss the role of women in IT and the issues surrounding it. We will be posting the recording from this session very soon, as it proved to stir discussion and got people thinking a little more about the subject.
Increased forum membership. We now have over 400 members participating in our forum, which is awesome! Our forum continues to be open to men and women, and will hopefully continue to be a great source of information and connectivity.
Continued success with our Big Sis Mentorship Program. This is a great resource here at PHPWomen, and if you’re not taking advantage of it, then you should be. We’ve now had members who were Little Sisters (the ones being mentored) that have since grown in their skills enough to become mentors themselves. It becomes a win-win for everyone.
Growth in informational content. One of the goals of our group is to provide a helpful resource for those learning PHP. As such, we have published several articles through the forum and had great success with our Article Contest. We plan to do this again next year if we can!
Growth in our IRC channel. Our IRC channel on Freenode continues to be a great way to communicate with other PHP women. We’ve seen this channel grow tremendously, and it’s almost always active, so if you find yourself needing to chat or just with some extra time on your hands, feel free to pop in an say hello.
We’ve also got big plans for the upcoming year as we begin to formalize our structure a bit. We are going to kick everything up a notch so if you’re interested in becoming invloved with our efforts, now is a great time! We will be updating our Delegations page to reflect where the most help is needed, so be sure to keep an eye on that. For starters, some of the things we’ll be working on include:
Formalizing our non-profit status. We’re finally ready to become an official non-profit organization, so this is one of the things we’ll be working on in the upcoming months.
Increasing exposure at conferences. Conference presence has continued to be a great source of exposure for us, so we’ll keep this up as much as we can.
Encouraging women to submit CfPs and to be published. Sadly, the number of women speakers at PHP conferences and women authors is still disproportionately low. We are going to be taking a more active role in notifying our members when CfPs for conferences come about, and encouraging them to submit. We will also be helping them submit ideas for articles, whether it be for our own site or for others.
Continue to welcome women into the community. We’ve tried very hard to make our community here a warm, friendly, and helpful one. We will continue to place emphasis on this as we feel it’s one of the great things that keeps us going. We’ve had some good ideas around this, so make sure to keep your eyes open.
Fundraising. We have so many great ideas, but unfortunately a lot of them take money to implement. We will be ramping up our fundraising efforts in the upcoming months, so if you have any ideas, be sure to let us know!
All of us are so thankful for the wonderful and continued support we’ve received from the PHP community at large - we couldn’t have done it without you! These are truly exciting times to be a part of PHPWomen, and I look forward to the year ahead.
Now, who wants cake?
This is a follow-on to the earlier ZendCon 08 article, covering days 2 and 3 of the conference. Day 3 might have only been half a day but these two days were jam-packed with sessions and things to do - not to mention the exhibition halls and social events! The days started early since the conference included breakfast - I really approved of this, it was a great central point to meet up with people at the start of the day and I really like food in general
Exhibitors
There were lots of good exhibitors there, and as is common at these conferences, they had lots to say and some stuff to give away. I had really good chats with the people from SugarCRM, Oracle, Yahoo and OpenSolaris and gained a USB key, a calculator, a book, a collapsible frisbee, a water bottle, some CDs and a cuddly monkey. There were plenty of other interesting exhibitors, Zend had a cool stand in the middle of it all and this served as a central point for many gatherings.
Day 2/3 sessions
The schedule at ZendCon is completely packed, and on the Wednesday there were 4 parallel conference sessions plus two tracks of unconference. Since I can’t be in more than one place at once I didn’t see everything I wanted to but I saw some excellent sessions. I also gave a session myself in the uncon jointly with Matthew Weier O’Phinney called “Subversion Tips and Tricks” which despite being a rather last-minute effort was well received.
Parties
Wednesday (day 2) saw an exhibitor event in the evening, with competitions, followed by an opportunity to meet the Zend Teams - they formed a panel and we could ask them questions. Later on (these are long days!) there was a party thrown by Yahoo! featuring “Yahootinis” which I didn’t drink but they had cool ice cubes in which lit up!
PHPWomen
Despite not having a booth this year, the phpwomen were high profile - and we loved how many people brought along and wore their PHPWomen and/or booth babe shirts from previous years, it was so nice to see!! There were quite a few women speakers over the course of the event - Elizabeth Smith, Sara Golemon and Laura Thomson all gave talks. I spoke in the uncon and we also had a “Women in IT/PHP” uncon session which was really excellent, organised and chaired by Juliette Reinders-Folmer. It was also a lot of fun to meet the women we didn’t know already, they’re a good bunch and it was interesting to hear their stories. I have a interview from one of those sessions that I hope to post here soon. I’ll also have more about the uncon session and what was discussed there but for now I’ll leave you with a photo:
Conclusion
ZendCon is one of the biggest events of the year, and brings some excellent opportunities to attend the technical talks and the networking sessions alike. For me it was my first trip to the US and also the first time I had been to a conference this size, so it was rather daunting, but I had a great time, learned a lot, and met new friends that I will continue to stay in touch with. The conference ran very smoothly throughout and I think it can be considered a great success.
I’m at ZendCon in Santa Clara, California, and so far the conference is going really well - even the wifi works! In common with quite a few conferences, the day before the main conference begins is tutorial day here. With 4 parallel tracks (at least) right throughout the conference, there is plenty to choose from. There was a crash certification course, and there are exams available to take during the event - they are wildly oversubscribed which I think indicates how popular this is! I attended the Best Practices session followed by the SQL Query Tuning session - both were really informative and well-paced (critical if anyone is going to stay awake in a 3 hour session!) although I definitely started to lose my way during the second session.
Since I’m ZCE I was also able to attend the evening event for ZCEs and speakers, which was very good - I spend a lot of time in various IRC channels and so I was able to meet a lot of people in real life whom I “know” already. There was also some drinking later in the evening …
Today is the first day of the main conference. There are 5 tracks plus the unconference and the exhibition space so really there is way too much to fit into one day! I’ve been to sessions on search, PECL, extensions, and more. This morning Juliette Reinders-Folmer had a session in the unconference entitled “Women in IT”, which was an opportunity for interested parties to get together and discuss the issues around this topic. We think we have the audio recorded from this session - in which case we hope to be able to publish it here. Both genders were equally represented in the session and there were some interesting debates. I came away from it ready to support the cause of women in IT some more.
The social side of the conference is a big factor - there are parties every night and I’m learning as much from the conversations I have at these events as I am in the official sessions! I think it helps that I already have online relationships with quite a few people - but I’ve also met other attendees who aren’t part of that community and had some really great experiences. Tonight there is an exhibitor reception - there are some good booths here, I wandered round earlier and picked up the usual collection of freebies, and had really good chats with the people at the sugarcrm and oracle booths particularly.
So far, its a good experience and I have stacks of notes I’ve taken in the sessions of things to try out or look into in more depth when I get some time. There’s two more days to go and lots more fun to be had. I’ll leave you with a pic of a few of the PHPWomen:
(left to right: Juliette Reinders-Folmer, Lorna Mitchell and Elizabeth Smith)
Next week sees the PHP Community descend on Santa Clara, California for ZendCon. This is one of the bigger conferences of the year and has everything you’d expect from an event put together by Zend. There are some great speakers, in the main track and in the “unconference” and it sounds like there will be some great parties too. The PHPWomen will be there, we’ll have a booth so if you are attending this conference, drop by and say hi!
Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we’ve been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our “Best Practices” section. We’ve been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!
The judges have made their decisions and we have our winners, they are:
Congratulations to both of you - you have been messaged via the forums to request your contact details so please respond so we can sort out your prizes. It was pretty close at the top so actually congratulations are due to all the participants - well done everyone! And now the contest is over, I hope the forums will continue to be a fun place and a good resource for all PHP-ers - we’ll see you there
