Over on federated social media, my long-time programming friend (and former JavaScript developer meetup organizer) Daniel Cousineau had a multi-post thread lamenting the demise of the "tech meetup" and was wondering what to do about it.

Daniel's thoughts on this caused me to reflect on my years of doing developer advocacy via speaking at conferences and meet-ups. I've been doing it since 2016 and, well, I know this sounds weird but I got bored and decided to do it a lot less.

Just before we occupied the current Fortress of Grumpitude back in 2017, I had been basically going full-throttle with career-related travel. When February 2018 rolled around, I had just finished a streak of getting on a plane for work or to speak at an event for 36 straight months. The evil Facebook reminded me that in 2016 I spoke in Australia, Serbia, England, and Chicago all before the end of July. Not to mention travelling at least twice a year for Mozilla events.

I was tired and wanted a change. I had also grown weary of talking about testing. Sure, it was my thing. But there were so many other things I was interested in talking about and sharing. So by conference attendance dropped to doing one talk a year basically. Then the pandemic started and there were a few random online events I participated in.

Still didn't feel very satisfied. Still was super bored.

Then I made the decision when I attended Longhorn PHP 2022 that I was not going to do any testing talks any more. I did a three hour talk that attempted to summarize everything I had gone through on my journey to becoming on of the most vocal and (for a time) well-known PHP testing evangelists.

Then I went to php|tek in Chicago in 2023 not as an attendee, but to volunteer at the booth for OSMI -- Open Sourcing Mental Illness. My good friend Ed Finkler started up this non-profit and it continues to do unappreciated work in the programming community. It was close enough that I could drive. Flying would've been about 6.5 hours door-to-door -- the drive in my MuskMobile was about 8.5 hours with stops for meals and charging. A lot cheaper than flying though. The weather was great, the miles slowly piled up, and I got to hang out with a lot of my friends for the first time in a long time.

It was great to sit in a booth and not feel any pressure to deliver talks. Not that I had felt pressure in a long time, but it is still a non-trivial amount of work to come up with a talk. Deciding on material, creating slides, practicing the talk (although after many years of public speaking I can often improvise).

I still have the desire to share, to advocate for things I find interesting. So I decided if I was going to do talks again on my once-a-year schedule, they were going to be on my terms.

Luckily, I can still write talk proposals that get accepted. I will once again be speaking at php|tek 2024. I will be driving there again in the MuskMobile, but a long-time friend who has never been to Chicago is going to come with me and we'll do some touristy stuff and then he can wander off to do his own thing while I speak.

So, what did I decide to do to keep things from being boring? By making my talks stealth talks.

I'm giving two talks -- one about Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and configuring NeoVim to be a PHP IDE.

The CQRS talk is really going to be a stealth talk about paying attention to design patterns. I was asked on Mastodon for my thoughts on what I felt self-taught programmers were missing out on compared to those who actually studied computer science. Being half self-taught (I want to college for computer studies but before the rise of the web) I could share I felt self-taught folks tended to reinvent things and to ignore design patterns.

So I want to teach the audience about design patterns and cover the ones you are most likely to encounter in their work building web applications.

The second talk about configuring NeoVim for PHP use is actually a stealth talk about choosing and mastering tools. I have been a Vim (and now NeoVim user) for many years. In fact, pretty much every blog post here was written using Vim or NeoVim. I've used it a lot for PHP development. But getting to know how to use Vim taught me the importance of mastering your chosen tools to get the results you want faster.

So, I want to suggest strategies for choosing your tools and some deliberate approaches I have tried that seem to have worked. I use PhpStorm for most of my PHP work these days due to great third-party tool integration, but with Vim keybindings activated. I then use NeoVim for everything else.

Takeaways

Even though the benefits to both me personally and my career were immense, I grew bored of giving conference talks. Now I am determined to do them a lot less but under my own terms.

Maybe I will see some of you in Chicago the last week of April 2024?