The PHP North-West Conference 2014 was certainly one of the biggest things we have been looking forward to, here at Viva IT. We waited patiently for months, and then, in the last few weeks things seemed to fly by quicker than we’d anticipated.
Before we knew it we were on our way to the event, aside from a few minor travel disruptions. Even the cancellation of our connecting train from Birmingham, and having to stand for most of the journey did not affect our excitement. When we eventually got to the hackathon/and social at 10pm, we were warmly greeted by the helpers and finally got to sit down and experience the buzz.
Generally, developers are known to be fairly introverted in nature (apart from a few), but the great thing about events like PHPNW is that everyone is equal. The people on stage don’t have all of the answers, and nor do the developers in the audience. These kinds of events are about the transfer of knowledge, sparking ideas, and finding new ways of doing things.
There is so much opportunity to see the different experiences of people and snippets of knowledge, that it would be impossible to attend all of the talks over the course of the event. Luckily the developers here at Viva IT each had their own views on what would be most interesting, so at least we were able to come back and share the experiences and knowledge internally.
By being on stage, the expectation of the audience is that they think you know everything about the subject in question, but in most cases this isn’t true. Although, that said, this experience is incredibly valuable to people who may be trialling, learning or completely novice to the subject. Even seasoned professionals will probably learn something! The fact that people are getting up on stage to share their experiences is fantastic, and more people should be doing it.
The popular un-conference that was being held simultaneously to the main tracks, is proof of this. People were given the chance to share their experiences to a relatively un-intimidating audience, although they may sometimes have needed a little bit of extra encouragement to do a talk — our developer, Lewis, decided to forgo the bottled water that was supplied, and went straight for the Newcastle Brown before his talk about why RAP is not as bad as it seems!
We would really like to thank everyone involved with setting up PHPNW14, there so many people to list, but it includes (not limited to): the speakers, the organisers, the staff at the conference centre, the Viva IT guys for coming along, and ultimately all of the developers who made the experience so fantastic.
Nelly is currently keeping watch over our offices!
We are looking forward to next year’s event, and hopefully we can bring more of our developers along!
We’re also excited to announce that there is a PHP East Midlands un-conference being organised for late 2014. We’re proud to be a part of hosting it in Leicester, keep an eye out for updates on the PHPEM website and the PHPEM Twitter!
