London, Baby! Conference, Masterclass and Meetup

As Joey from Friends would say, “London, Baby!”. Well, maybe he wouldn’t anymore because that episode first aired 18 years ago. And also, he’s fictional. But I’m off to the UK in a few weeks, and can’t help but echo the sentiment.

London, Baby!

This’ll be the second year I’ve tricked convinced SilverStripe to fly me to the UK. Last year I headed over with a couple of my fantastic colleagues to run some events surrounding our opening of our physical presence in the UK. In addition to a couple of SilverStripe-specific meetups (see my charming talking head in this SilverStripe blog post), we also attended PHP UK Conference as a sponsor.

PHP UK Conference 2016
This year I’m coming over for the PHP UK Conference again, this time as a speaker. I’m pretty excited about this—I’ve spoken at a few conferences here in New Zealand before, but this’ll be my first international speaking engagement. Exciting new locales! Strange accents! Even fewer people understanding my jokes!

I submitted a few different topics as ideas for speeches, so it’s interesting that the one that was eventually picked was inspired by last year’s PHP UK Conference. While manning the booth, I had a lot of conversations that went like this:

   “So, what’s SilverStripe then?”

   “It’s an awesome CMS. You should use it.”

   “Yeah, that seems cool. We use <other CMS> at the moment. We hate it. Our jobs are tarpits sucking all joy and creativity from our lives and leaving our world grey, Wizball style”.

This made me sad. I mean, these were obviously cool people, hence the reference to Wizball, and they deserved to enjoy their jobs. The CMS space is highly competitive, and it surprised me that so many developers would choose to use one they dislike so much. Perhaps, I surmised, they simply didn’t know how awesome SilverStripe was? So I’m going to go tell them. If I manage to save one developer from having to use something terrible, it’ll have been worth it.

That’s just a metaphor, of course. Transhemispheric flights are expensive, and it’ll take more than just one happy developer to cover them.

SilverStripe Masterclass: Optimising website performance
While I’m in the UK, I’m also going to be running a master class. This is an opportunity for UK and European community members to come and learn some deep SilverStripe magic from me, award winning (runner-up, jam tarts and scones, junior division) CTO. We’ll be focusing on performance, which is a pretty universal concern amongst all developers. If you’d like to come along, we’re taking bookings at Meetup—places are limited, so book now!

SilverStripe London Meetup
I’ll also be attending the SilverStripe UK Meetup on 11 February. I think I’m talking about something? It’ll be great fun, and I’d love to see you. And unlike the master class or PHP UK Conference, it’s free. I’ll be fresh off the plane that morning, so if you want to see someone half-delirious from jet lag, I’ll have you covered. You can reserve your place for that at Meetup as well.  

Photo from the Sunday Times.