Community

January 28, 2019

Joind in Proposal and Next Steps

As promised this morning I'm delivering a proposal to the current and previous maintainers of the Joind.in team to build a team to take over operation of the hosted Joind.in service as well as how the project leadership should be structured with an emphasis of cross training and mentoring the next generation of maintainers. I'm honored not only by the many people who joined a random Discord...

community joindin projects

January 25, 2019

Joind.in Proposal Working Group

When I started speaking at technical events and conferences in 2015 Joind.in was critical in my growing as a presenter and speaker. I’m proud of the speaker I am today in part by how Joind.in facilitated the feedback that enabled me to learn and grow. Lorna (a long time maintainer/contributor) announced that the team will be discontinuing the hosted platform due to the lack of contributors and...

community joindin mentoring projects

July 22, 2018

PHP Detroit Tutorial: Hit the ground running with Laravel and Set up

I am giving a four hour Laravel tutorial before the main PHP Detroit conference. To fully participate in the exercises you'll want to follow the directions below. Please reach out to me if you have any issues. Laravel Valet is a fine solution if you’d prefer not to have to install Virtualbox or Vagrant. I will not be able to fully support everyone’s configuration so to create the best...

community conferences laravel speaking

April 28, 2018

Testing Homestead Ubuntu 18 .04

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! DO NOT DO THIS ON YOUR WORKING DEV ENVIRONMENTS THINGS WILL BE BROKEN AND NOT WORK IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO TRIAGE ISSUES DO NOT CONTINUE ** WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!** Want to help test the next base box for Homestead? Run this command to update the base box: From here run: And then tell me...

community laravel linux ubuntu vagrant

April 10, 2018

Passing the torch of Memphis PHP User Group

In September of 2012 David Haskins and I took over MemphisPHP from Jeremy Kendall. David Haskins and I had never run a user group before but we wanted to ensure MemphisPHP would survive Jeremy moving to Nashville. (Jeremy has since come back to Memphis and once again abandoned us for Austin, TX) The past ~6 years have been pretty amazing as I've learned an amazing amount from running MemphisPHP...

community general

August 28, 2017

The importance of hobbies

Nearly all the programmers I know count programming among their hobbies. I always have; I was a hobbyist programmer long before I was a professional programmer. The cautionary tale is about burnout. When you spend all day at your day job doing one thing and then going home and doing the same kind of work burnout can start to creep up on you. In 2015, I had a pretty big burnout attack and ended...

community day job projects

July 6, 2017

Install and Configure PHP 7.1 on Cloud 9 Workspaces

July 8th I'm giving a general PHP training day at the Fedex Institute of Technology and because I'm targeting absolute beginners I wanted to use Cloud 9. Cloud 9 is an online editor that gives you a full linux workspace to build your project in. The first thing I noticed was the container Cloud 9 provides is running PHP 5.5. I've created a simple bash script to update PHP to 7.1 and update...

community general linux php projects speaking ubuntu

June 13, 2017

How I rate talks for conferences and events

"If you've given a talk that's been recorded more than once. it's probably time to stop submitting that to conferences." -- an offhand comment I made on twitter. I made this comment after going through the first round of rating talk submissions for a conference I have the privilege of helping with talk selection. I feel like there was a lot of back and forth and it's obvious people have strong...

community conferences speaking

May 31, 2017

Communities and Silos Revisited

"You can be a part of multiple communities..." This is a hot topic for me, and I'm glad to hear Matt's opinion. I agree with everything Matt says. If you've not heard it yet go listen to this before continuing this post: http://www.fiveminutegeekshow.com/100Welcome back. I've talked a lot about Laravel developers being in a silo just as Symfony, Zend, and other frameworks have these silos. This...

August 31, 2016

PHP User Group Sticker Exchange 2016

I started a thread on the PHP UG Admins email list of doing a User Group sticker exchange and the idea took off pretty quickly. The idea is that user groups that want to participate send stickers to a central location. Stickers are then broken up into packets where every group that sent stickers will receive a packet of stickers from all the other user groups. The goal would be for every...

June 10, 2016

php[tek] 2016 in St. Louis was a blast!

This year php[tek] was in St. Louis, an easy four and a half hour drive from Memphis. Since I didn't have to fly to the conference I stocked up on a lot of local Memphis beer to share with my fellow PHP beer connoisseurs. Originally, my awesome wife Kara was going to join me, however, it didn't work out. Because I was giving a day long Laravel training on Monday and wanted some time to settle...

community conferences speaking testing

March 15, 2016

User Group Advice

When I introduce myself before I give a talk at a conference or a user group I mention I am a user group leader and very passionate about community. I happily receive questions from people starting new user groups or reviving old groups. I wanted to share a recent response I sent to someone today who was asking for advice about their meetup group: Congrats on jumping into the world...

October 23, 2015

ZendCon 2015 Thoughts

ZendCon 2015 was my first ZendCon experience. I was selected to give two talks, "Laravel Forge: Hello World to Hello Production" and "DevOps for Small Teams". This was my first time giving the updated talk about Forge which also includes a basic Envoyer review and I feel like the talk went really well. Attendees seemed to enjoy it and a lot of people told me afterward they enjoyed the talk. I...

community conferences devops laravel php speaking

August 17, 2015

Laracon 2015 Thoughts

In February 2015 when I found out Laracon US was going to be in Louisville, Kentucky I dropped everything I was doing and bought tickets. Even if I wasn't selected to talk I was going to attend a PHP Conference that was easy driving difference from Memphis. Laracon US in previous years was held in New York and Washington, DC. The closest PHP conferences to Memphis are in LoneStarPHP (Dallas) and...

community conferences laravel

August 12, 2015

On Community Silos

Before starting this conversation (I really hope it becomes a conversation) I would like to concede a few points. This may also give insight as to where my observations are coming from. I am a PHP Developer. Professionally since 2005, Hobbyist since 1998/1999. I am an active member in the PHP Community. I am an active member in the Laravel Community. I love Laravel and have been using it since...

community laravel php

July 1, 2015

In Transit

In Memphis, I'm the guy known for starting stuff. I have mostly started nonprofits and user groups. Honestly I've helped start more than I've actually started myself. I've had great fortune over the past several years to get to meet really awesome people in Memphis who share my desire to see technical events and communities grow here. We've done a lot of awesome stuff together. Today I informed...

June 5, 2015

Mentoring -- Things I wish I knew sooner

I was recently contacted by someone who saw my post about being a PHP mentor on PHPMentoring.org and was curious if I was still open to taking an apprentice. This was very neat because most of my outside-of-work mentoring (as an apprentice and as a mentor) has been very informal. I'm hesitant to jump into such a relationship because it really depends on so many factors. We need to figure out what...

community mentoring php

December 10, 2014

So you want to start a user group?

No one ever wants to start a user group until they've already made their mind up they're going to start a user group. Starting a group is one of those things other people do. People who are well known in the community, have had 20 years of experience on their user group topic, and have a job making millions of dollars in the area of the user group. In reality, the people starting and running user...

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