Selection

As organizers, we can provide our attendees with better content. Not just with content that we believe is good, but with content that people actually want to see. However, public votes will not be the only selection criteria, because we need to balance the content and our budget (we are, after all, non for profit). Don’t be upset if you were not selected even if you had many positive votes. We get hundreds of proposals each year and a limited number of slots.

Topic Spread

Many speakers do not propose on certain topics, because they expect many others to propose on the same thing. But you never know! It is possible to completely overlook an important topic simply because everyone is expecting someone else to submit, and doesn’t want to compete for it. This happens every year.

Now, a speaker can see other proposals by tag. If a tag or topic has little or no proposals, then the speaker would be tempted to submit. Even if there are proposals, a speaker may decide to offer a different perspective, or decide that the other proposal does represent the topic well enough.

Speaker Guidelines

By seeing what other do, speakers get a better picture of what works and what doesn’t. If a speaker sees that a topic had great votes, it will give him an idea of what makes a good topic. If the score is low, then he’ll know what to avoid. In any case, it’s good to know how others do it.

Also, consider a speaker whose proposals got low scores. He can try to figure out what’s wrong and fix it, or propose different topics that he believes are more appealing to the public. No more getting feedback when it’s already too late (and hope to see you next year)!

Scheduling

Once the papers are selected by the committee, creating a timetable is not an easy task. The ConFoo team spends weeks every year trying to find the best arrangement. With all the votes that will come in, we will be able to better determine the appropriate room size based on popularity. We will also be able to see which topics the same attendees are interested in, and schedule them at different times as much as possible.

Promotion

The more attendees we have, the better conference we can deliver. We hope that the speakers will promote their proposals in order to get votes, thus letting people know about ConFoo. More attendees also mean a bigger audience for speakers, so spread the good word!

Follow @confooca and share with the #confoo tag.

The Conference features technical one hour talks dedicated to many aspects of Web development such as mobile apps, security, databases, cloud, web standards, accessibility, project management, CMS & frameworks, startups, Ruby, Python, .NET, Java and, of course, PHP.

Organizers will prioritize new and original topics in English or French. Please submit your papers before November 26th. For more information, visit the website: http://confoo.ca/en/call-for-papers

Throw away old code

The first decision was to throw away the old code base that dated back to the first PHP Quebec Conference in 2003. We decided to start from scratch with the Symfony framework and I was going to be in charge (yay!)

Priorities

The conference was moving on and I had to keep up with the programming. Developing the website was only part of my responsibilities as an organizer, which made things even more difficult time-wise. I had to prioritize and develop the strict minimum based on the immediate conference needs. There was very little time to test between deployments (I know, it’s bad practice).

1. Logo and design

I was learning the framework while another member of the team, Yann Larrivée, was building the project skeleton. At the same time, we had an organizer, Mathieu Chartier, and his partner prepare the logo and the website design. Last year I was the one doing it and you could clearly see that I’m no designer and no expert in Web standards.

2. Call for papers

Besides a few static pages to present the event, the call for papers was the absolute first priority. Another member of the team had already put a project skeleton together, so I could dive right into the good stuff. Creation of user accounts, authentication, member dashboard and paper submission had to be put in place in record time.

Speakers could associate tags with their talks so that the organizers will be able to sort them out more easily. To put it in context, organizers were responsible each for his own track (php, python, java, ruby, etc.) and needed to know which talks fell under their responsibility.

The worst that could happen did happen. I was speaking at a conference in Paris during the last day of the call for speakers and the server crashed. Once fixed, we had to extend the call by three days because some people missed the deadline as a result of this extended site unavailability.

3. Talk selection

We needed a tool to sort through the 450 or so talk submissions. Thus came the admin section which was built by another member of the team, Sylvain Mathon, who had more experience with the framework. We put the talks in their corresponding tracks and spent a whole Saturday selecting the ~130 talks.

Since budget is a big consideration for a non for-profit organization, we built some tools on that same day to monitor, in real time, the estimated travel and lodging costs based on the selected speakers.

Then I also needed to implement the Session and Speaker sections. Considering the large number of presentations, I had to figure alternate ways to present all that info. I couldn’t just put it all on one page as we did with PHP Quebec in the past, where we had 55 presentations at most.

4. Tickets

A conference is no good if people can’t buy tickets to attend it. The next big priority was to implement a checkout process. So without time to catch my breath, I implemented a public shopping cart, then a mandatory login/registration, the billing information screen, the confirmation screen and a redirection to the payment screen. Also, I had to consider that ticket price varies over time (early bird, regular and at-the-door prices).

This was not the end. Since companies often purchase multiple tickets for their employees, we needed them to enter the attendees’ names and associate those with user accounts. I made the account creation/association process transparent to the buyer. They simply needed to enter the name and e-mail of the attendees.

Then people need receipts. Also, many institutions can only pay by check and thus need an order form. And so another member implemented the PDF module for our site.

5. Monitoring tools

Now that we started to sell tickets, we needed to monitor it closely to know when and where to promote the event. For example, we sponsored another conference in Quebec City (CLLAP) and needed to know our ROI. Based on promotional codes and referrers, visitor locations and technologies, we knew how to approach the different communities.

Also, we needed to monitor the impact of the various communications by checking what tickets we sold on each day.

6. Flash sale

I still couldn’t put the checkout process to rest. Now we decided to do a flash sale, that is, a special price that will only last a week. Luckily for me, the mechanism was already in place with the different pricing, so it was simply a question of adding one entry to the database with starting and ending dates.

7. Schedule

Selecting the talks is not enough. We needed to fit those in a timetable, and so assigned this task to our “schedule squad”, consisting of four organizers to speed things up. They spent yet another Saturday on that and came back with a very nicely put together schedule.

On that day, I had to create an admin tool to put the ~130 talks in a timetable, a Schedule page for the visitors, and a neat way to access speaker bios and session abstracts. I made it right on time.

But the a surprise came! Some sessions were in two parts; something I did not plan for in my programming. Luckily, it wasn’t very hard to implement and I could still present the schedule page for team approval on the next day. Once pushed to production, the server started to run slow and so some pages were cached, which saved tons of resources.

8. Training

In the beginning of January, we finalized the outlines for the PHP, Python and MySQL training. Now the website needed a Training sections, the possibility to purchase training tickets online, as well as a training+conference combos. The combos were much trickier, so I re-wrote a portion of the shopping cart and the way totals were calculated to allow special discounts. This proved useful for community and other specials later, so I’m glad I put that extra effort in it.

9. Buzz

I now got some people excited over a slick schedule builder that they saw on PyCon’s site. So I spent a day or so on that one. Once done, appetites grew. I now had to allow people to save their schedule and optionally share it with the world. Another day went into that. I’m quite proud of the result though.

10. Joind.in

People started to nag on Twitter and via e-mail to have the ConFoo talks on joind.in. I don’t blame them, as it’s a tool that proved itself over the years. I contacted Chris Cornutt to see if I could help him to implement an API. I then learned via Derick Rethan’s blog that he implemented one! That was indeed good news. So I sent an XML with the 132 talks over to Chris (no way was I going to enter these by hand) and he parsed it for me.

What’s next?

I probably forgot some things in the 10 sections above, since I wrote so much code and specs just keep pouring in.

Next, I will write more admin tools to help me add talk abstracts and timetable to the printed conference program. I will also need the system to spit some XML to print the hundreds of badges, a system to allow at-the-door registrations, check if an attendee actually registered and mark them as present in the system when they come in the morning of the event, maybe even print badges on the fly…

I’m pretty satisfied with the result. There is still much work to be done, but this work will not have to be done over again next year. That will leave me more time for other conference matters.

Who should care?

If you’re a consultant, you will find service providers such as hosting or voip. You might also find clients or start-up partners. You will also meet people with complimentary skills who can help you out on contracts. You can even find book or magazine publishers if you have things to say.

As someone looking for a job, you will find your next employer. If you are already employed, you’ll meet core developers on the projects or libraries that you use at work. They might answer your questions or take your feedback regarding their project.

When will I find the time?

How will I keep track?

Do conference organizers care?

As a conference organizer, I do care. Having visited many international conferences, I know what it’s like to be a visitor or a speaker. I know where, when and how networking happens at conferences. If I feel that something is missing, I tell the organizers and fix the problem at my own conference.

All comments to this post will be considered as suggestions for the upcoming ConFoo conference, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

Over 100 specialists will be present at the conference to share their knowledge during talks and training. Among them will be:

• Rasmus Lerdorf
• Terry Chay
• Chris Shiflett
• Morgan Tocker

You would not want to miss the following presentations:

• HTML5: Where Are We Now? (Mark Pilgrim)
• Andrei’s Regex Clinic (Andrei Zmievski)
• Security-Centered Design (Chris Shiflett)
• Welcome to the Wild Wild Web (Carl Mercier)

Register online before January 22nd and save 200$! http://confoo.ca/en/register

Looking forward to see you at the conference.

Use ZF or die!

The sessions

There were a number of interesting sessions, such as the security tutorial by Arne Blankerts and project management by Rob Allen. The optimization session by Ilia Alshanetsky also caught my attention.

Of course, we should not forget some great UnCon sessions that Keith Casey organized. I had the privilege of presenting two of those, which had lots of positive feedback: Motivating Developers and Role of a PHP user group. I believe that these UnCon sessions were as important, if not more important, than the official sessions.

The people

I met a lot of wonderful people, as well as old friends. As with all conferences, a lot of it is happening in the hallways and I was glad to have taken a few sessions off for that. I met leaders of other User Groups with whom I intend to stay in touch.

Everybody was very friendly and it was quite easy to gather a group of over a dozen people to go out for dinner, although some days I intentionally went with a smaller group to relax a bit. With all the dinner->bar->bar->yet another bar, I got quite exhausted. Josh Holmes from Microsoft was kind enough to help me out with a bill in a bar when some people from our group left without paying.

On Wednesday, I went to Microsoft’s Bing Party at Ruby Skye with a group of about 30 people and had a lot of fun. We got a party bus to get all these people to San Francisco and back.

The sponsors

I really enjoyed walking around the expo hall and talking with all the companies. Freebies tend to help that. I did learn a lot about new products. I actually was so excited about Adobe’s products (for many years now), that they should have hired me to run their booth – according to Kevin Hoyt.

I discovered the joys of cloud computing, which was the word of the day.

Framework shootout

The last session was a framework shootout, which was a lot of fun. It started very “kumbaya” but got a bit more tense after some time. The Nerf guns helped a bit. I actually tweeted a nice picture of Matthew Weier O’Phinney aiming one at the audience. I took one of these guns home for my kid, who enjoys it a lot.

It seems that there is no better framework out there. You should choose one that best fits your needs. Some offer more flexibility, others do everything for you.

Conclusion

I definitely enjoyed this conference. I hope to come back next year if my budget allows. I understand that I could save quite some money if I fly to San Francisco instead of San Jose, at the same time avoiding connecting flights. I definitely recommend this conference.

I posted all the pictures on Flickr.

I had the pleasure to attend php|tek this year in Chicago. This conference was organized by php|architect.

I attended some very interesting presentations such as “Dissecting an MVC Application”, “Alternate Databases”, “Of Haystacks and Needles” and “Seven Steps to Better OOP Code”. I enjoyed the Pecha Kucha presentations. These were very short presentations on topics not always related to PHP. I liked the one by Scott MacVicar and Andrei Zmievski on spelling.

I also met many interesting people with whom I intend to stay in touch. Wade Arnold, author of Zend_AMF, should be expecting feature requests and patches from DevBots. There were many interesting discussions around best practices between the presentations.

I was also able to catch up with my international friends that I don’t get to see very often. We celebrated Chris Shiflett’s birthday by going to a Peruvian restaurant and enjoying a great variety of beer at the Map Room, in the company of Andrei Zmievski, Sean Coates and Scott MacVicar. I enjoyed the event so much that I stayed an extra day to visit Downtown Chicago with Stefan Priebsh, Sebastian Bergmann, Arne Blankerts and David Zuelke. I posted some pictures to Flickr.

The only negative comment that I would like to share is the fact that WiFi was very unreliable during the event. I ended up paying to use the hotel’s WiFi every day to stay in touch with the office.

My next stop is ZendCon in San Jose, California.