conference

The European DrupalCon was held in Dublin from 26th - 30th September and I went along with a couple of colleagues to learn a few things about Drupal. I have been back from the conference for a few days now, and I wanted to write down some of the highlights of the conference in a blog post. There is a lot going on at DrupalCon and with 2000+ people, 3 full days of sessions, 2 tutorial days, multiple parties and over 10,000 cups of coffee consumed there is too much to write about here. So this will be a few random highlights and stand out moments of the conference.

PHPNW is the 8th annual PHPNW Conference, and I think I'm lucky to be one of the few who have attended every year. This was something that Jeremy Coates mentioned out as we sat down the introductory session, but it was also good to see lots of new people attending the conference as well. It was a great conference with a great community feeling.

The keynote this year was by Meri Williams, who talked about Stealing People Lessons from Artificial Intelligence. Meri's career has been in both development and project management and she was able to use lessons learnt during her PhD thesis on artificial intelligence in order to think about how people respond to work. The concept sounds a little un-emotional at face value, but part of the principles of AI is making sure that all agents have their own goals. Meri was a funny and engaging speaker who talked about all kinds of interesting aspects of how people learn and grow.

Nearly a month has passed since my visit to London for this year's DrupalCamp and I thought I would put my thoughts down on the blog. I went down with a group of colleagues from my company Access on the Friday night before the event, having arranged a flat through Airbnb for all of us to stay in. After some beers and a burger we were ready for the main event on Saturday morning.

The annual PHPNW conference, now in it’s 7th year, was held on the 4th and 5th of October in Manchester, again in the Manchester Conference Centre. The conference was attended by over 400 people with over 30 speakers from all over the world who talked about everything from project management to the internals of PHP. I have been volunteering at PHPNW for a few years now, but this year I was able to attend as a delegate with a number of colleagues from Access. It’s been a few weeks since the event, but I haven’t had a chance to publish this review, so here it is.

PHPNW13 is the 6th annual PHPNW conference, organised by members of the PHPNW community and Magma Digital. This year the conference saw around 420 people (with myself as a helper) at the conference, which was held in the Manchester Conference Centre.

My involvement in PHPNW13 started a few months before the actual conference. When the call for papers closed back in June I spent a weekend reading the submissions so that we could pick which sessions would be at the conference. Out of the 183 papers submitted (20 more than last year) we had to pick just 35 or so sessions that would be presented at the weekend. The final selection of talks was really good and judging by the comments and rating on joind.in they were well received by the other conference attended as well.

When Mike Bell approached me several months ago and said we should do a Drupal camp in the north west I was completely on board with the idea. So for the past few months I have been working with Mike and a group of people from the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) to create such an event. The result was DrupalCampNW2012, which was held from Friday 23rd to Sunday 25th November. The venue was the new University of Salford campus buildings in MediaCityUK.

Our main stumbling block in getting this conference up and running was the venue. After talking to some of the computer science people in the University of Salford they offered the use of the building in exchange for some free student tickets.

The annual PHPNW conference gets better every year, and this year was no exception. I have been going to the PHPNW conference since their inception in 2008 and this year I was lucky enough to be involved in some of the pre-conference organising and helping out over the event.

When the call for papers ended in June I spent a weekend reading abstracts and bios of speakers to try and reduce the 169 talk submissions to around 32 sessions. I then sat down with Jeremy Coates, Rick Ogden and Jenny Wong to select which talks would be included in the final selection. Once the sessions were complete I sat down and started working on a blog schedule and wrote a few blog posts to garner attention.

Saturday 30th June saw a one off event organised by the PHPNW community called LAMP and Beyond. The idea was that it would bring together people of differing abilities with the aim of sharing skills and experience with servers, programming, source control, or whatever happened to be of interest at the time.

With 30 or so people signed up to the event we filled the top floor of MadLab in Manchester and got started (after a bit of coffee first). Taking some post-it notes we wrote down what we wanted to know about and what we could teach about onto a board and then broke off into groups where people's interest matched.

The 7^th, 8^th and 9^th of October saw the fourth PHPNW conference in Manchester, and I was lucky enough to be part of the team helping out on the day. I spent the day before the conference driving speakers from the airport to the Mercure (formerly Ramada) hotel in Manchester Piccadilly, and only partially getting lost in the convoluted mess of one way streets in the city centre.

This weekend I attended the Druapl7Camp 2011 in Leeds and so I booked a hotel room for the weekend and managed to find the right place on Saturday morning. I was one of the first to arrive and was able to greet people as the came through the door. With coffee flowing nicely and the wifi appearing to be stable we all set down to the first session.