Speaking the Speaker….
Recently I had the chance to visit two SEO Conferences (smx and semseo) here in Germany. Phew - I can tell you these people know how to party. Not that I do not enjoy the evenings at the php conferences I usually attend, but hey - when was the last time at a php conference where there was an organized coyote ugly party and the crowd was filled up with tequila from nearly naked beautiful women? At least I can’t remember. Followed by that I’ve enjoyed a karaoke show where one of the organizers - Alan Webb from Abakus presented his version of Sinatra’s - or was it Sid Vicious? - version of ‘My Way’. Well - we definitly can learn from the SEO folks a lot about partying. Maybe we will enjoy Bjoern Schotte singing and dancing in Berlin? Would love to see this.
Back to business - let’s get a bit more serious.
For me it was a quite unusual experience being a visitor and not one of the speakers so I could experience how difficult it is as a ‘plain’ visitor to get into touch with the speakers. In every ’scene’ the speakers usually know each other for a quite long time and enjoy to meet again - so it is for me on the PHP Conferences. We gather, hang around, talk, drink and have fun. Nothing wrong with that. Only - if you are not a ‘member’ of the speaker crowd it might feel a bit difficult to enter the conversation and get into touch with us. Especially developers tend to be bit shy - not much of us you could call ‘extrovert’. Humm… well besides me.
PHP is open source, driven by the community. And this is about you. Some of the speakers on the conferences around the world might contribute a bit more than you do - but nevertheless you are part of the community. So you are part of the ‘crowd’ and so you should act.
So if you want to get into touch with me for any reason then feel free to approach me any time. I will happily answer your questions, share a beer with you or will help you to get into contact with other people you are interested in.
Next chance to meet me is on the IPC Spring Edition in Berlin next week. Hope to see you there!
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