"Insert clever statement of ‘it's been a long time since I last posted here'"

Now that we have that out of the way, the past few months have been quite busy for me.

I gave my "Laravel Forge: Hello World to Hello Production"  talk at the first php[world] conference (organized by the great people behind php[tek] and php[architect] magazine) and it was my first non-local conference speaking opportunity. It was an honor to be listed among so many other great speakers and I had a great time at the conference. I also made plenty of time to hang out in the hall way track, an important part of any conference. My talk went well, but being so nervous I sped right through it and finished exactly in 30 minutes. I was mortified. Fortunately there were some great questions that allowed me to expand on some key points and that saved the presentation in my opinion. I did get some good feedback on the talk so I'm sure it went better than it did in my head.

A couple of weeks ago I gave my "Secure Form Processing and Protection" talk at SunshinePHP in Miami. This was a great conference experience and I spent more time in the hallway track this time around. Was absolutely great. I felt my talk went really well and I got some good initial feedback from attendees. A few people mentioned it was too short and that caused a great bit of concern for me because the talk ran 50 minutes in a 60 minute slot before any questions and answers. I was already very worried about the talk running short. It seems though that the people who mentioned they thought the talk was too short also thought that it would be a good topic for a 3 hour tutorial. That kind of format would open up a lot of things I would love to do like live demos of exploits against local machines. I'm going to be submitting this as a tutorial in the near future, We'll see what the conference organizers thing.

Most recently I had the opportunity to give my "Laravel Forge: Hello World to Hello Production" talk again for NomadPHP.com EU Chapter. This is the same talk I did at php[world] last November but since then, Laravel 5 has been released and Homestead has gone from version 1 to version 2. I was happy to share the great improvements. NomadPHP is a unique speaking experience because it's all done online so there is no immediate audience feedback. During your presentation you're talking to your slides. This didn't bother me as much as I expected and I was still pretty nervous so I ended up rushing through my first third of the talk. I ran a little short but I still clocked in at a respectable (in my opinion) 47 minutes. I really need to work on relaxing and not blowing through content. I've been getting good feedback via joind.in so I think it went well.

I'm both sad and relieved that I Don't have anymore speaking engagements planned but I do have proposals out there so I'm excited about the potential of getting selected to speak at some conferences later this year.