Talks With Secret Topics

I've been speaking at conferences since 2005. Yes, that is a ridiculously long time. While these talks have mostly been about testing practices, I enjoy creating talks that actually have a secret topic in them. It's usually related to the main topic, but given I usually have 60 minutes to fill I feel like I need to give the attendees a glimpse into how my grumpy mind works.

Many of my testing talks end up covering one of more "secret topics":

• defensive coding styles
• third party tools to apply consistency
• design patterns
• how luck is just really skill and opportunity intersecting

On the one hand, I have a captive audience forced to listen to me. On the other hand, I do like to be entertaining and informative. Choosing this "secret topic" style allows me to embrace what I feel are the good parts of me:

• loves to talk
• has seen so so many good and bad things in his career
• wants to help people learn faster than I did with less suffering

I will be speaking at php[tek] 2024 in Chicago at the end of April. After speaking at LonghornPHP in 2022 I had decided to no longer do testing talks. I've been doing them since 2005. 18 years is enough. Please. No more.

I got selected to give two talks, none of which are testing related. I want to share what those talks are probably going to look like. I don't have them written yet but I have the outline rattling around inside my head and it will get turned into slides and (in a newer twist) some live coding to go with it.

CQRS talk... that is really about web site architectures

My first talk is "Break loose from CRUD - use CQRS" where I will show how I refactored a legacy PHP application that was a mess using the Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern.

In order to understand why we have more options that the "traditional" Create Read Update Delete (or CRUD) pattern that ties our implementation to database-related actions, I plan on doing a brief history of architectures that can be used with web applications. I think a lot of folks simply are not aware of the different options available to them due the domination of modern PHP web application frameworks by a few big players.

I chose CQRS for a project because it had been related to another topic (event sourcing] that other much-smarter programmers than me had been talking about.

NeoVim-as-PHP-IDE talk...that is really about mastering tools

My second talk is about my NeoVim setup for doing PHP work. I also use PhpStorm a lot for my PHP work, but it's good to have options.

I learned how to use Vim almost 20 years ago but dabbled constantly with other editors. Some of it was tribalism, some of it was my restlessness with the status quo. I've used Vim/NeoVim for so long that my muscle memory is strong enough to ruin working inside tools that do not support Vim bindings or modal editing.

NeoVim being completely customizable forces you down the road of thoughtful customization -- since so many things are possible, and not constrained by NeoVim itself, you are responsible for figuring out what you want your IDE experience to be like.

So this talk will cover my own path to selecting and mastering tools. Understanding the limitations of something is the best way to push it in the direction you really want it to go.

Secret Talks Require Confidence

It's no secret that I carry myself with a lot of confidence -- the whole Grumpy Learning brand would not have worked without it. When you also decide to create secret talks, you need to have the ability to tell a story and weave different elements together to constantly reinforce the overall message.

I don't think this technique is for everybody -- it requires being comfortable with the idea that there is a lot of background information that is relevant to the topic your talk is supposed to be covering.

At this point, I don't think I could build talks any other way and still be true to myself.

I hope to see you at tek2024!