I used to speak at more than a dozen conferences each year, and it negatively affected the quality of my talks and the quality of my life. My speaking schedule for 2009 was much better:

PHP UK

I gave the last talk at PHP UK, and although it wasn't considered a keynote, it sure felt like one. It was one of my favorite talks for numerous reasons. I had just spent a few hours drinking Persian tea in the sun at a café with Jon and Jon, so I was both relaxed and energized. The stage had no podium, so I felt very connected to the audience. (It also helped that the auditorium was shaped like a bowl.) The feedback was also extremely kind; people thought the talk was inspiring, even better than expected, mind boggling, and the highlight of the conference. (One person even suggested it saved the conference.) Perhaps more surprising than the quality of the feedback was the quantity, thanks mostly to the ubiquity of Twitter. To those who said nice things, thank you so much. It really helped lift my spirits. I capped off my visit to London with an Arsenal match. (It was yet another draw; they're doing much better this season.)

PHP Québec

Almost immediately after returning from the UK, I was off to Montréal for the annual PHP Québec conference, one of my favorites. I enjoyed all the usual delights, including viande fumée at Schwartz's. I was very happy to be giving the closing keynote, and even happier about how many people were there and all of the nice feedback on Twitter and elsewhere. I managed to get a photo of the audience participating in a change blindness experiment, which I later used in a change blindness demonstration, just to be meta. :-)

php|tek

The annual php|tek conference was back in Rosemont (not too far from Chicago), and it was every bit as fun as expected. I was able to celebrate my birthday at the Map Room, where Sean played beer host, and everyone had a great time. (I know I did.) I also managed to make it downtown, where I tried Chicago-style pizza for the first time. It was pretty good, but it just can't compete with New York-style pizza. (I still love going to Grimaldi's for lunch when the line's short.) My talk was a big hit as well, but I didn't have quite as much energy as when I gave it at PHP UK.

OSCON

San Jose is no Portland, and that one fact made this OSCON a little underwhelming. It has often been my favorite conference of the year, but not this year. Luckily, Andrei convinced Helgi, Jon, Sean, and me to stay in San Francisco. As a result, some of my best memories were of places like Samovar, 21st Amendment, and Russian River. In the evenings, I learned a lot about grids, leading, and vertical rhythm from Jon while watching him prepare his talk. The tutorial I gave with Sean went really well, although it was a little rough around the edges, and my talk was a big hit. A big thanks to Chris Sontag for saying it was "by far one of the top three talks" of the conference. :-)

CodeWorks

My last conference of 2009 was actually four conferences, because I participated in a traveling conference called CodeWorks that visited seven cities. (I spoke at the last four.) Atlanta, Miami, Washington, and New York each have their own memories. I received more feedback on Joind.in than Twitter during CodeWorks, which is a testament to the fine work of Chris Cornutt, who has been making it better and better over time. (It's a speaker feedback site.) Aside from some really good talks, one of my favorite memories of CodeWorks was sitting outside in Miami enjoying cigars, mojitos, and conversation with fellow speakers. My favorite stop was New York, of course, where I played tour guide for as many people as possible. I also organized a beer dinner at Beer Table to cap off the conference. It was a fantastic night with great food, great beer, and great friends.

Here's a brief list of other highlights:

• Sean and I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine.
• I participated in CSS Naked Day for a third time.
• I was Slashdotted for the seventh time.
• I visited Iceland for the first time with my friends Andrei and Helgi.
• I left OmniTI and started a much-needed period of renewal, also known as funemployment.
• I moved my office to a shared working space in Dumbo — Studio 612A — with the world's best studio mates.
• Sean and I pulled off another PHP Advent, an annual PHP tradition since 2007.

The highlight of the year for me was announcing Analog. I still can't believe how supportive everyone has been, and I can't thank you all enough. You can tell there's a lot of excitement and energy in the air as we enter 2010, and I hope Analog is a big part of all of the good things to come.

Keeping with tradition, here's a list of things I hope to accomplish in 2010:

Speak at better conferences

I'm cheating a bit, because I'm already scheduled for Kiwi Foo Camp, Webstock, ConFoo, and South by Southwest. If I speak at no other conferences, this is already going to be a landmark year for me. I hope to one day become one of the top speakers at web conferences, and speaking at fewer, better conferences should give me the opportunity to make progress toward that goal.

Make something

I like to learn and share what I learn, so I do a lot of writing and speaking. I want to continue doing that, but I want to also find time to make something. I'm very lucky to be working with great friends at Analog, and because this is one aspiration we all share, I have high hopes. :-)

Work on my blog

This is a minor goal, but I want to spend some time fixing a few old bugs in my blog, including a finicky OpenID implementation. (If you try to comment with OpenID and have trouble, please try posting without it, and sorry for the hassle.)

Publish more

During 2009, I wrote one article and a handful of blog posts each month. I try to always be very respectful to my readers, so I only post to my blog when I think I have something interesting to say. (Posting highlights each year might be an exception!) 2009 was a tough year for many reasons, and my inspiration suffered. I'm already excited about 2010, and I hope to blog much more. I also have a growing list of ideas for articles.

Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful 2010.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00 GMT — Chris Shiflett’s Blog

A few months ago, I was on top of the world. The place was called Sjónarsker, and the view was breathtaking. It was the third day of a road trip around Iceland with my friends Andrei and Helgi, and I had just shared some big news with them. I was leaving my former company and starting something new.

They wanted to know what I would be doing next, and although I didn't know, I did have an answer. "Good people. Good work." These four words became a personal mission statement in the months that followed — something to provide focus and clarity.

Good people and good work go hand in hand. I remember how much I enjoyed working with Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins a few years ago when redesigning my blog. The experience is perhaps best remembered with a comment I made shortly after we finished:

Working with both Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins was a joy; not only do they possess the skills necessary to shape ideas and bring them to life, but their rich personalities and keen sense of humor makes the entire process a lot of fun.

Good work isn't work; it's fun. To do our best work, we need to love what we do. We need to surround ourselves with good people who appreciate good work. We need the freedom to break boundaries. We need to be inspired. Above all else, we need to be happy.

I'm very happy to introduce Analog, a co-operative of web designers and developers:

Analog is a company of friends who make web sites. It's a co-operative where imagination, design, and engineering thrive; good people doing good work.

Allow me to introduce you to my friends.

Alan Colville

Alan is a user experience designer who has been making the Web a better place for more than a decade, helping companies like BlackBerry, Vodafone, and Visa. Although his professional experience is impressive, we're more impressed by his achievements on a bicycle, like being the runner-up at the Kona Cheddar Bikefest 2009.

Andrei Zmievski

Andrei is one of the best developers I know, and if you use PHP, chances are you've encountered his work. He's a member of the PHP Group, started PHP-GTK, helped create Smarty, and is the architect of the Unicode and internationalization support in PHP 6. In fact, when Yahoo switched to PHP, they hired Andrei. He's also a talented photographer and brewer, and 100 days from now, he'll be running the Marathon de Paris.

Jon Gibbins

Jon, also known as Gibbo or the Prince of Kindness, is a multi-talented web developer and accessibility aficionado who has helped companies like Travelodge and National Geographic. His mastery of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP is truly inspiring. On occasion, he suspends his kindness long enough to play a mean guitar.

Jon Tan

Jon is the best designer I know. I first encountered his work long before I knew him as a person, and I still feel extremely lucky to know him. His love of typography is evident in all of his work, and he's one of the only members of the International Society of Typographic Designers who focus on typography for the Web. He's also a former journeyman in the Guild of Indian Ocean Octopus Fishermen. I'm pretty sure the guild is made up, but the stories are real. :-)

Co-operatives are organizations that adhere to the co-operative principles. Jon's description of his personal values — values we all share — helps explain what we're about:

I believe that everyone working on a project should profit equitably from it according to the scope of their participation. I believe we should have the right to claim our own work irrevocably, without suffering the indignity of being white-labelled. (It still happens.) I believe that working for nothing in order to secure clients is daft, and reject the notion that designing "on spec" has any benefit whatsoever for anyone involved. I believe that if democracy and freedom are important to us, then they shouldn't be signed away when we take a job.

Being a co-operative is an important part of who we are. This is why we proudly use analog.coop as our all-important online identity. It's also why we're an industrial and provident society, which is something I hope to tell you more about in the near future.

Twitter seems to be the primary source of activity these days, so it felt natural to announce Analog there, which we did just before Christmas. We're still a bit stunned by what happened next. TweetReach says news of our launch reached more than a quarter of a million people on Twitter in the first few days. The abundance of support and kindness has been both overwhelming and uplifting. To those of you who helped celebrate our launch, I can't thank you enough.

There's a lot more to talk about — GeoIP wrangling, Twitter integration, #grid, Easter eggs, &c. — but I'll save those topics until I have more time.

For now, I just want to wish you a very happy new year! :-)

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00 GMT — Chris Shiflett’s Blog

Paul gets things started with an article on comprehensible code:

Reading code is hard work. Here are some reasons why, along with some tips on how to make it easier for other developers to understand your code.

Thanks to everyone who has helped spread the love on Twitter and elsewhere, and thanks especially to our authors.

We've got a few surprises this year, so I hope you'll follow along. You can follow @phpadvent on Twitter, subscribe to our feed, or just visit phpadvent.org for a daily dose of tips, tricks, and tidbits.

You can also read previous PHP Advent articles if you haven't already:

• PHP Advent 2007
• PHP Advent 2008

In addition to PHP Advent, you might also be interested in 24 Ways, an advent calendar for web geeks.

Mele Kalikimaka!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00 GMT — Chris Shiflett’s Blog