LornaJane

One of the biggest dangers in this industry is getting left behind as the tools evolve very quickly. For me, working alone or as the most senior person on a project in most cases, this becomes doubly hard as there's nobody in my office to show me a new trick or share an idea that he or she learned in a previous job. So how do I deal with this?

I take "study days".
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I don't mean learning to talk, I mean learning to address an audience, coherently and without dying of fright (actually I think I have clinically proven that it isn't possible to actually stop living as a result of fright). There are a couple of things that I'm involved with that may help you, if you're looking to improve your successes in this area.

DayCamp4Developers

This is a virtual conference, held a few times each year. I've spoken at some of the previous events and been really impressed by how smoothly something quite intangible can run! The next event is on Friday 22nd March and is about public speaking - but aimed specifically at developers. If you want to speak at a user group or conference, or be able to get through presentations at work without stress, then this session will give you some good pointers. The speakers are three excellent conference presenters - and me :) I love this format, what else are you doing on a Friday (especially for Europe, where this doesn't start until our afternoon)? You can register and find out more about the event here daycamp4developers.com/. Did I mention that tickets are $40? You can also sign up to get the recordings if the date/time doesn't work out for you.

WeAreAllAweso.me

There's been lots of fuss lately about women speakers at conferences, or the lack of them. The low percentage of women in technology and a missing tendency to put ourselves forward for things means that this isn't going to change any time soon. However if you've been thinking about speaking, then you should know about an online group WeAreAllAwesome which is a meeting point for women speakers to brainstorm ideas for topics, put abstracts together, and share experiences on how to give a good talk. Our office hours are 6-7pm UK time on Tuesdays, and I'm one of the mentors in that project, so if you might speak or just want to join in chatter with women who do, then you know where to find us :) Continue reading →

While working on a book ("PHP Web Services" from O'Reilly, not out yet but soon!) recently, I was looking for some place I could make HTTP requests to, to show off how to make different kinds of requests with different tools. On my own machine, I have a couple of scripts that chatter back giving debug information about the requests that were made, but I wanted to get the tools examples going without any additional dependencies at all. I hadn't used anything like these tools before, but I found quite a few alternatives, so I thought I'd share what I came up with. Continue reading →