Ben Ramsey

Ideas of March

Twitter pretty much killed blogging for me. When I signed up for the service six years ago, I was blogging quite a bit, but Twitter’s rapid-fire, ultra-short status updates have given me a 140-character attention span. Not only did I stop blogging, but I stopped reading blogs, too. Reading and writing became a chore. While I could fire off a message on Twitter within minutes or seconds of crafting it, blogging was an endeavor that took much longer—hours or even days, at times.

Writing an Effective Talk Proposal

Earlier today, I was asked “Any tips on how to write a proposal for a major conf?” I’ve never shared tips on this, and since the calls for proposals for Sunshine PHP and Midwest PHP both end tomorrow, I thought it would be a good idea to share my approach to writing conference proposals.

The Era of PHP Testing

Over the past decade, the PHP community has progressed through a handful of distinct eras that have each been marked by a focus on specific best practices. This is most evident in the types of talks presented at conferences and user groups and in the articles published by php|architect magazine, PHPDeveloper.org, and the blogs of those whose feeds are distributed through Planet PHP.

In thinking through this, I’ve come up with the following eras I think we, the PHP community, have had over the last ten years. These are in a general order, but eras overlap, and some have lasted longer than others, so there’s not a distinct beginning or end to each.

On the Rise of Community Conferences

The PHP world is exploding with community conferences. In fact, web development technologies in general are seeing a wide range of community-driven conferences springing up around the world. I think there are many reasons for the proliferation of these conferences, and in this post, I present my opinion on how this trend came to be, along with a definition of what I think constitutes a technology-focused community conference.