It was my first ever public speaking gig (if you ignore some sales presentations) and I’m delighted by how well it went. The talk was a ten minute powerpoint introduction and then 45 mins of live coding - this was pretty taxing - finishing off with a 30 min Q+A.

The powerpoint bit was a breeze and the coding went OK because I’d run through the whole thing on a number of occasions to prepare. I did wobble at one point when I got an error but it turned out that I’d saved a file to the wrong place.

I got some great feedback from Ed Mitchell, the guy running the show, and according to him the audience was paying very close attention to everything I was doing; so at least I didn’t bore them.

I also got to meet a few underscore regulars including Rick Hurst, Andy Gale, Dan Hilton and Oliver Humpage (who also works at the Watershed as a techie) and the evening was finished off by getting pretty messy with Ed, Toby Roal and Dan Dixon who all seem like good eggs.

For those of you interested here are the following things I used in my presentation:

• My powerpoint slides
• The script that I followed
• The final code

Initially meant to be a shoot-out between different PHP frameworks as discussed on Underscore (the Bristol web-types mailing list that is approaching its 10th birthday) however I seem to be the only one silly enough to actually do it so it’s now a solo gig.

Entitled ‘A Pragmatic Look At Symfony’ I’ll be ripping through the basics of what Symfony offers and then getting straight into building a simple application. I’ve made a good start on the app which really does need to be simple and most evenings this week should mean I’ve the coding finished so I’ve a small amount of time left to polish the presentation off.

I’m looking forward to it as it’ll be a new experience for me and will also be a chance to finally attend an Underscore event; I’ve been on the list most of the time it has been in existence and have never met any of its members (due to being in London most of that time).

Related:

The Symfony Project

Ed Mitchell’s blog