It’s just past 5AM as I start writing this. I’m sitting downstairs in the ZendCon hotel, with a view on an empty bar and brightly coloured gambling machines. Since I woke up at 3AM (don’t you love jetlag?) and today is the day I travel back home, I’ve been reflecting on the conference. I’ll be…
I got a private message on one of the Slack networks I’m on on August 2nd. Mike Bell invited me to write something for Geek Mental Help-week. As usual, I delayed to the last moment to write that, and the Geek Mental Help-week was last week. I’m publishing this now, a couple of days too…
This is just as much a post for future me as it is for the rest of the world. While I was working on preparing a training for the end of the week and was using PHPStorm to create some example code, all of a sudden my PHPStorm stopped responding to my clicks. I could…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PHPNW conference, every first weekend of October in Manchester, is the best PHP conference I’ve ever been to. I buy my ticket blindly as soon as they go on sale every year. I’ve been accepted to speak very regularly in previous years and then raffle off…
I’ve been meaning to write more about speaking recently, so after I wrote about my personal CFP rule, let’s write about a very related topic: The Speaker Package. What is it? The speaker package is the term used for the package of reimbursements and other advantages you have as a speaker. This may (or may…
One of the first things you do if you want to speak is that you submit to a CFP (Call for Papers) of a conference. Most conferences use this system to get a nice selection of talks out of which to compile the schedule for a conference. The idea is that speakers tell the conference…
A couple of weeks ago while walking towards lunch with Jelrik we were having a bit of a discussion about the use of the term Command. Not long before that, Jelrik had asked a question about naming of Commands in our Slack channel, which led to some confusion. The confusion of the term Command The…
ConFoo 2016 is over. The past days a huge amount of developers, most of them from Canada but also from the USA, The Netherlands, South Africa, France and quite a few other countries came to Montreal for ConFoo. I know I had a lot of fun, and I surely learned a lot. One of the…
Tomorrow it is three months ago that I launched my Patreon page. As I mentioned in my blogpost about launching my Patreon page, it was mostly an experiment to see how that would work out. I’ve seen a bunch of artists use Patreon very successfully, but the world of PHP, open source and software development,…
The new year also brought a new customer for me: At the start of January I started at the Digital Solutions Center of Schiphol Airport. They have an awesome project going on, and I operate in one of the two scrum teams there. When you’re starting with a new customer that has adapted Scrum (or…