 I'm gonna tell you a story I know that everybody wants to go and drink beer and eat mini burgers So I'll try not to keep you here too long I do find it difficult to stop talking once I've started so there's that but we'll try and get through this It's my story and it starts a long time ago when I was a lot younger than I am now. Yeah, that's me I had hair and not quite so fat, but it is me honestly and and We should really get started on this story at a point where I went to university So I'd be interested to know even though I can't really see you all how many people here have got a university Degree or a university education? Yeah, that's pretty cool a lot of people. I really enjoyed my time at university, but I never ended up actually getting a degree Yeah, I failed university I Failed university twice, which is kind of a record I guess I went to Lester University and started doing a Computer science course, which I found really difficult Apparently, there's a lot of maths in computer science who'd have thought it Didn't find that too easy at all So I did what everyone does and stopped going to lectures and got a job at British gas on their database system earning something like something crazy like seven pounds an hour Which put me a guard among students back in the 90s. So that was really cool. Then I went to Ponte Prevee University It's probably worth. What was there a cheer then I couldn't Yeah, I went to Ponte Prevee Uni and again Really didn't take the uni But I was very lucky that I got off at a job which would have been a job I wanted to do when I finished university anyway, so I was very fortunate at this point, it's probably worth addressing the fact that I am Welsh if you hadn't noticed I'm from this tiny town in South Wales. It's called Port Talbot It's famous for one thing and one thing only Port Talbot for scale. We're actually somewhere out here. I think Correct me if I'm wrong, but Port Talbot's a really interesting town very small town in South Wales. I Mean if you do a Google image search for London, this is the kind of thing you see some really amazing Photographs the amazing skyline, you know some nice red buses and if you do a Google image search for Port Talbot This is what you see So we're kind of defined by one thing in Port Talbot and that's the steel industry There's a huge steelworks looming over the town and that is how close to the town it is It's right there on the houses But it's really fortunate for me because obviously steelworks have computer systems So when I wanted to get a job in the computer industry, I was really lucky to have this industry right on my door So yeah, I went to work for British steel which then became chorus which then became Tata blah blah blah And I started working 1999 on a really interesting problem. So how many people remember the Y2K bug? Yeah, I can see you. It's good. Yeah a few people there's a few people there with as old as me And so I went to start working on their Y2K problem. Obviously, they have a ton of Microprocessors across the whole steelworks recording, you know The weight of this vat the thickness of the steel right here You know, how much is in this system? How much is in that system and all of those microprocessors had a problem in 1999 because Short-sighted coders in the 60s and 70s had stored the date as two digits instead of four digits for the year So nobody knew what was going to happen when 99 rolled around to 0-0. What was going to happen? I mean, why didn't these developers in the 60s think their code was going to last that long is the first question? I guess that's what happens to all of us but it's a really interesting job in theory and but really what I was doing was Looking at a spreadsheet and looking at a list of all of the makes and models of the process of microprocessors We had and then phoning them up and saying excuse me manufacturer is this product Y2K compliant and if they say yes I put a tick and we can forget it and if they say no then somebody more intelligent than me has to go and Look at the ladder logic in the code. So it was not a very interesting job at all. It turns out There's a lot of hanging around waiting for people to call you back. There's a lot of waiting for emails There's a lot of search in the web to find out if anyone else has checked this stuff And so what I did is what most people who have a window computer Who have to hang around a lot is I played a ton of mem-roms Does anyone know this game you can shout out if you know it Super Mario. Oh, dear me. That's terrible Over here. There was a Circus Charlie. Yes. Who said that? I'll bite you will be a good job You've seen this talk before that does not count that does not count Luckily I changed up some of the other ones so we're okay Yeah, I started so much hanging around and so much messing about sorry this microphone is really annoying me But you know, there was a whole process control department. So there wasn't just me doing this Stuff on you know looking at the Y2K problem We had a whole huge oracle database that used to take in all of these metrics and all of this data And what we would do then is pay expensive Third parties to write screens so the managers can see exactly what's going on on the plant at any one time But of course this was only being stored in a database. And so why did we need to actually? Pay somebody to come in and take this data and present it surely. There's a better way that we can do this where We can use existing infrastructure and display this data cheaper And we already were using a windows NT for domain if anyone goes back that far Excuse me. I did say there should be beer when I had my writer, but it's fine We use a windows NT for domain. So we had a Microsoft and infrastructure We had you know Microsoft SQL server and Internet information server at the time and we know we had all this Infrastructure so I started looking at active server pages which could pull the data out of the database and display it in a format We had a corporate internet which used to be like a really big deal back in the like late 90s early 2000s Net to see anyone who actually had a corporate internet that used to display any information that was of any value But we had one so it was all good So yeah, we started it. I started to tinker on with active server pages and they were really cool So as anyone does anyone remember ASP classic ASP. Yeah a ton of people. I Did a Google search for for ASP and this is a genuine image that came up which kind of sums up how ASP was working for me It's like trying to get it to work. It's like rolling a dice Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't More interestingly to get it to work really well It's like balance and dice end-on-end which is like really hard So yeah, I started working with ASP and that was a pretty cool thing You know, I really started to enjoy this whole more development oriented job that I was doing And then I decided, you know, this is really cool stuff And I want to be able to do this in my own time as well as you know in works time But ASP has a fundamental flaw back then in the in the 2000s the early 2000s Which is the cost of the licenses were extraordinary Like internet information server was really expensive and a Microsoft Windows NT server was really expensive So it wasn't really something the hobbyist could do So I stumbled across something called personal homepage or PHP pre pre or PHP have to be a too much recursion Leave that there and I wanted to be able to use this stuff for my own kind of hobbies Now I was playing a ton of online gaming a ton of Counter-Strike back then if anyone remembers sort of semi-competitive counter-strike and of course we were in a clan and Back then I think people were more interested not in how you were doing in in in the clan leagues in your ladder With your win-loss ratio, you know, the best clans are the ones with the best websites So I got I can use PHP to you know, create my own website for my own clan So we can look really cool and I came up with this And that's a genuine website. I did in the early 2000s using PHP My design skills are actually gone worse since then so that's kind of embarrassing But yeah, this is the kind of thing that you could do as a hobbyist programmer back then You know, I had to search the way back machine for this I didn't actually have a copy of this, you know anywhere on my own system And it was very interesting when I looked at the way back machine because there was only three snapshots There was and they were in very quick succession. The first snapshot was of Plask login. I don't know if anyone remembers like shared hosting where you'd log into Plask and set up your hosting So that was the first snapshot. This was the second snapshot and this was the third snapshot It kind of sums up my PHP coding of the day, um, yeah Kind of become familiar to me ever since then but that's cool So I was back at work I was tending to do less development in work and more development at home at this point I'd come back to doing kind of mundane work rolling out new PCs and you know, not stuff that I was really enjoying So yeah, I kind of my attention slipped and I ended up playing a load more main ROMs And I probably should have anyone want to shout this one out Double dragon from the back and at the front so good. Yep. So I ended up thinking, you know, it's time for me to move on I Can make an amazing glan page in PHP, you know I am the boss of this language now So I did what everyone does when they want to do more kind of something of a hobby that they want to do more of I became a contractor, of course Because I can do a hobbyist clan website. Therefore. I should be charging top dollar to Corporations, right? Yeah, that wasn't the best move I've ever done in my career. I'll be honest Because I was a terrible developer Whoever muttered you still are in the front row I Was a terrible developer, but I quickly found a niche which is really interesting for me I found a niche where I may have been a terrible developer if your metrics were Code reusability and maintainability and copy and pasting and solid and all of that stuff But I found a really quick niche where I had got a really good reputation for being able to get the job done quickly I'm being able to pick up projects that had faltered and get them finished So I was an okay developer if getting stuff done on time and on budget was important a lot of the stuff I was doing was like Six to eight week marketing campaign. So the code wasn't going to be long-lived anyway So it didn't really matter if it was held together by you know string and duct tape for six or eight weeks Interestingly one of the jobs I did was for for Intel the the processor manufacturer where they wanted to run a promotion for their resellers and They They wanted to just basically show a flash movie where you move to remember flash Yeah, where you move along the this path to say how close you are to winning the grand prize and that was really cool You know it it was a hard job because they were giving me the data in an Excel spreadsheet Twice a week which I then had to import into php and then render out as XML Which sounds really easy, but of course the spreadsheet didn't come in the same format any two days So real pain in the ass, but I got a really good reputation of being able to get the job done when other people had kind of failed Or they would start to panic which is really good. So yeah, not the best code I've ever written but you know the money was okay So there's that and then my my my daughter was born So it was time for me to get a full-time job because my life as a contractor then as a single man You know, I was either really really rich or really really poor. There was no kind of middle ground I was either going on huge full-star holidays or I was like trying to see if my parents would buy me some food So it's time to kind of get a bit more stability here So I went to work for a company called vivo digital a really nice little company who were Doing TV over IP which is kind of a new thing then now is something we all take for granted watching TV Over the internet or over IP networks But back then it's kind of a new and interesting thing and we were doing this digital signage stuff Which is again you see this in like the smallest corner shop will have a digital sign on the on the till on the front of the till But back then it's kind of spangly and new And that was pretty cool And I got some time where I could rewrite the whole PHP back end that managed the digital signage system back Then the way that we would allow people to have more expensive systems So you could buy the basic system or you could buy the more expensive system and the way that we decided if people could have The more expensive features was to comment out the anchor link in the HTML before we ship the product to them And that's the truth. It's like oh, yeah, you haven't paid for that. I'll just comment it out in the HTML It's fine. You'll never know So there had to be a better way than that, right? So we had some time it was cool. I got some time to rewrite the whole system So I was thinking are we really need something modular where we can just drop modules in if this stuff is enabled So I googled as you do PHP modular framework I think and there must be people, you know, I've seen PHP classes So I knew there were things out there where you could sort of use other people's code And I stumbled across it which is the Zen framework 1.7. This is the first version of the Zen framework I ever used kind of a red letter day for me there because Up until this point, I'd heard of the new keyword, but I didn't know what it was My all of my PHP was like require header require database and then run some sequel command in in amongst the HTML And then I'll put that straight into the browser, you know looking back Terrible, but it worked at the time. It was fine So it's this is a point where not only did I find a framework, but I started to learn object-oriented PHP kind of important And after a while of using Zen framework, I got to understand it There's a very steep learning curve in Zen framework one, but I got over that hill and became an amazing developer again excellent Yeah, that's kind of the most dangerous position I've been in where I think I'm an amazing developer Because I can do anything I want in this one specific framework, but I don't really know what I don't really know I'm looking up thinking I'm climbing this mountain and there's the peak right in front of me And I've only got 10% to go and then you take a few more steps and you find out that's not the peak at all There's another huge peak behind it that you have to climb and this point is the point where I think I was my most dangerous Because I was a terrible developer. I just gave my own joke away, but that's fine. I was a terrible developer I didn't really know anything about what I was doing. I could copy and paste stuff from Stack Overflow with great efficiency But that was about it But at least I suddenly came to the realization that I had huge huge holes in my in my knowledge So I had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask And anyone who use them framework one or two will know the documentation is not the best. Let's just go that far I Can say that because I'm the maintainer of the documentation so you can hate on me if you use them framework I am sorry So I had so many questions and going back to my counter strike roots I was really lucky that I knew what IRC was and there was a channel called ZF talk on free note So I joined that channel Not that you know not that long into my development career with Zen framework And that's kind of when I had the first epiphany that I had about Developing I'd worked for small companies. I'd worked on my own or I'd worked for small small Single developer companies. I didn't realize that I'm not the only person who's doing my job You know, there's a whole community in this room a huge community of developers in this room and everyone You know, some people will be working for bigger companies where they'll have had peers They work with every day, but for people like me in the room There's this real kind of moment where you think oh, I'm not alone as a developer Other people have the same problems that I have and other people can help me to solve those problems And that's kind of a really cool moment in my career when I met some amazing people in that channel I met people like Ryan Mauser who was absolutely tireless in answering all of my questions Even when I thought I was asking Zen framework questions and what I was actually asking was basic object-oriented programming questions Ryan still helped me out. He was amazing, you know people like Rob Allen who is in here this year But it's spoken on this stage many times, you know really really helpful People like Catherine Reeve who's in the front row here really helped me out without you know You can't tell you how helpful to help me get over that bump and to better myself So I thank all these people who've helped me along the way But Rob and Ryan was speaking to me. We've been speaking on IRC for a while bless you and They found out that there was a new user group starting in Bristol a PHP Southwest was starting in Bristol and basically they dragged me along. They wouldn't take no for an answer and They dragged me along to this user group So this is the first time I went and I met some people I've met on the internet in real life I think that's kind of a weird thing to laugh at now where you know, we all do this Fairly regularly, but back then it was kind of a weird thing. I'm like trying to say to my girlfriend at the time now My wife. Yeah, I'm just going to meet a group of men that I met on the internet And he was all men I apologize. I am saying men deliberately But I did go they did persuade me to go. I was there. This is a photo from the first-ever PHP Southwest meetup. I am there. There I am You could just see my my big fat belly, but they're poking out But I went and it was amazing. It was completely amazing I met some people like Stuart Herbert and other people who I now count as friends. It was absolutely fantastic So again another red letter day and everyone here, you know I hope people here who come to conferences will be going to use the groups as well because it's amazing and that was really cool Meanwhile back in my job We'd kind of ground to a halt this amazing small company It suddenly stopped getting any sales and I didn't really have a lot of work to do So I bet you can guess that I started playing some maim roms Anyone want to show this one up Gauntlet no no no no Goals and ghosts those who said ghosts and goblins close, but you owe me a drink So yeah goals and ghosts this so I started to taper off. We didn't get the work I looked for some new jobs and there was a really cool company in Cardiff called Microcosm games a gaming company, which is perfect for me You can tell already that I really you know really enjoy my gaming. So This company this was would have been sort of mid 2000s. This company wrote games for Facebook And when I say games, I obviously mean games Really they were databases wrapped in pretty pictures that were intended to just spam your friends as much as humanly possible I'm sure anyone who's been in on Facebook since like the mid 2000s will remember It was the golden age of people like me because they were no they were no limits You could just do everything you wanted to try and get as many signups as you can but it was quite cool because Believe it or not the tiny team of six developers in Cardiff had the official license to produce the Lord of the Rings game On Facebook which now is staggering to think of that, you know, that is Unbelievable but we did we had that and we wrote some crappy sort of grinder game Where you literally just press buttons in random orders and level up And then we try and make you pay to get more energy and one of those great classic Facebook games But it worked really well. It worked really well The most interesting thing for me at this point Was that we started using Zenfone work to for for our one of our back-end systems Zenfone work to would just come out. It was still in sort of pre Beta I they'd released an alpha at Zencom, but it was way too early, but it was it was there It was working and I found a bug Our new versions are coming out every sort of three weeks and every three weeks I had to go and patch this same file because I found the bug and of course I'm not going to contribute that back, but in the end I got persuaded to to create a pull request You know instead of monkey patching this file every single release Why didn't you just create a pull request and you know it'll all everybody will benefit So here is my first ever pull request In 2011 so we've skipped ahead a few years, but it's in 2011 my first ever pull request not that long ago And you can see that the important thing here is that created the pull request. It was merged Matthew we are finny one of the nicest people I have ever met You know, this is the way to welcome people into your open-source project That's the way to respond to people who were given their first contribution there note that he says particularly the tests I Can write tests? So let's just take a look at what that pull request actually entailed before I start congratulate myself too much So the here's the test which I literally just copy and pasted from some other tests are in the file and change the string You know, I didn't know what that was at this point But I still I wrote the test right copy and paste change a couple of strings and then you get a nice message from the maintainer More importantly, let's take a look at what the actual code change was that I did So this is my first ever contribution to open source You know, I added three characters to a regular expression But it counts right it does count So I've got to mention Matthew we have finished who's honestly one of the nicest people I've ever met being amazing to me in my career Mentor to me. I guess an unofficial one, but definitely a mentor. Anyway, the question here I'd like to ask everyone is this got merged on the 11th of November 2011 Any guess is what I did on the 12th of November 2011 the next day played me and roms is a good guess, but it's not right. Yeah, I mean Removed them. No, I didn't revert that that would have been crazy. No, I Made another pull request a good guess. Actually, I updated my CV Obviously, I am now a contributor to the Zen framework and so I should put that on my CV, right? And I say that as a joke, but I really mean it, you know that that's valid. That is valid The point here is that contributing my first pull request, you know It's a really small change and I will not tell you how scared I was even submitting that I Had several people some who may even be in this room to review that for me under the table before I put it public You know, I really it took pushing from my peers and my friends to get me to do that tiny pull request Because contributing is scary. Nobody wants to be criticized, right? Nobody wants to be told. Oh, you've done this wrong You've done that wrong. Why are you doing it like this? This way is better. It's horrible thought But for me there was a moment really early on in my contributions where I realized that If you don't take it as criticism Take it as free code reviews. It doesn't suddenly seem to be so scary I've learned so much stuff from Code reviews of my code on open source projects by people are more experienced smarter than me, you know No, a 10 more than I know and I've learned so much in my career from these free code reviews that I've got from contributing to open source It's pretty cool when you think of it that way, you know It's not quite so scary to think of it as oh, they're gonna criticize me as oh, they're going to teach me It's a much nicer way to think of what your contributions will mean The other point that is important to me is most people really want you to get your stuff merged Very few people in very few projects will want you not want you to get your stuff merged Because if you fix a bug and it gets merged it's merged for everyone. Everyone gets that bug fix If you add a new feature, everybody gets that new feature, you know, everybody wins So most people want you to get your stuff merged And that's probably the time to mention this guy Does anyone know Marco? Yeah, Marco's maintainer of the doctrine product project So if you use doctrine Marco's the person you should think his tireless work and makes doctrine happen He's also a maintainer of them framework He's also like the most tireless code reviewer that I've ever met in my life In a commercial sense, that's really good You know, I think he's even gonna start a business giving code reviews to people because he is code reviews are spectacularly detailed, you know, he can review your code with such clarity His comments are like really succinct and he really comments really well, but he does comment quite a lot on your code reviews The comments do keep coming for quite a while And even when you fix one thing, there'll be a comment coming about something else a little bit further down the line until The comments are just starting to really annoy you when you see this little Mario in your sleep looking at you Mario then suddenly starts appearing in your inbox and in your github notifications. There's Mario everywhere Mario is watching you Marco is always watching you He's a hard man to please Marco, but I've learned to tend from him and he knows this joke. So, you know, it's all good But most people want you to get your stuff merged and this is a free experience to learn That's a really important thing to think about if you're trying to learn a new product I wouldn't you know advise giving terrible submitting terrible code just to get the free code reviews But if you've looked like you've thought things out and if you look like you've thought things through and if you just need a small hint This is the time to get free code reviews because free code reviews are free learning So meanwhile, these two people who have dragged me to PHP. Sorry PHP Southwest Told me that I was now going to a conference and again. They didn't take no for answer. They were like no We go into a conference and you're coming So I went to PHP Northwest in Manchester in 2012, which is not that long ago either. It's kind of cool. I had an amazing time I met this guy Evan Curry who will come back to later super cool guy done more at 19 than I done at 30 something So an amazing amazing developer and a really good friend of mine now I met Lana Mitchell again a stalwart of this conference who became my kind of speaking mentor really She's the person who told me that it's a bad idea to give a talk in a Hawaiian shirt So you can thank her for that I'm still not convinced, but I do take her opinion. Yeah And I also give my first uncone talk at the first conference I went to which is really weird when I think back about that now But it seemed okay at the time and the unconf in these conferences I know some don't conferences don't have them But if you go to a conference where they do have one an amazing place to just get up and give a talk It would be nice for me to say look I had four star on joined in my first talk But everybody in my room in the room was my friend. So I Only had four stars off my friends in the first talk. I ever gave it's probably a better way to frame that But I was really cool to get to a conference So now I've gone from a small user group to meeting new people and a lot of them at the same time You know really again, everyone here has probably felt that buzz you get when you come home from a conference And you feel motivated and you've got new things you want to try out and that's really cool Yeah, things weren't going well again I ended up playing the ten of main ROMs again life was going downhill in my job Most people should know this one, right? Yeah, that they may that may be lost in translation burger time Yeah, one of my favorites. So it was time to move on from microcosm games We'd lost the license for Lord of the Rings apparently like a real games company wanted to be able to do that So we lost the license overnight. So it was kind of it wasn't it wasn't a great separation But you know, it was fine. I still had to work out a notice period which is a great time to play main ROMs If you're of that persuasion, I went to work for a company called yango which transitioned into ad spruce Really cool company in Swansea. I really enjoyed it. But more importantly, I started to submit to conferences And I started to submit to conferences Because I love coming up as you can tell and talking to a room full of people when nobody can walk out. Oh, sorry But the the important thing is to say that this is kind of the red-letter day for me You know, this is an uncone of the bottom two and cons and the middle one is a kind of small community conference Which was accepted after I got accepted to Zencon. So I got accepted to Zencon for my first-ever conference And the reason that Zencon accepted me is because of my contributions to their project It wasn't an unknown entity. They knew that I'd been contributing to Zen framework So I knew that I could speak about Zen framework Because I'm contributing therefore I can be trusted. So that door was definitely opened by my contributions to open source And I've been to PHP UK a couple of times. It's worth mentioning. I've met some really cool people here People will come on too later And apparently this happened when I googled my name in PHP UK. So Yeah, that was that was a good night. I think if I can remember rightly And but more importantly, you know, this road for me started with contributions And if you're scared about putting your code out there contributing is not just about coding I would recommend anyone tries to aspire to to submit some pull requests open source software for code But if you can't contribute with code or if you know, you're not that comfortable yet Then documentation is a great place to contribute people will absolutely love you if you start contributing documentation A wonderful way to do Yeah, and if you do want to start contributing documentation Zen framework's a good project to do it on so It's all good. But triage is an amazing thing you can do If you see bugs being reported, all you need to do is look at that bug and see if you can reproduce it And if you can reproduce it just put the steps you did on the issue Because the people coming behind you have to fix those bugs will absolutely love you for that For them to have just a reproducible set of steps. You know, that's really cool And writing tests is another really good thing you can do for projects that don't have a huge test coverage Um, if you were in Anna's talk earlier She's speaking spoke really well about testing and you want to level up your testing skills There's tons of open source projects out there like joined in where we all give feedback Which has has got low test coverage And if you start submitting tests there just because you want to practice writing tests They love you for it and you get to practice writing tests And also win-win Giving answers on places like stack overflow are on on IRC which is what we used to use before slack came along. So giving answers on slack Writing writing a personal blog about what problems you've solved that day is an amazing way to start contributing It may not feel like you're contributing officially But you really are because if you're giving answers when people google problems You're really helping the community and the project that you're supporting to grow It's also really good for building a personal brand. I found that Blogging is something that I don't do enough now But early on in my career really really helped me and people like rob allen who we mentioned only blogs when you know If he solves a problem for himself He blogs to remind himself when he needs that fix that same problem in two or three years And that's a really good way to do it. It doesn't need to be 10,000 words 100 words is good enough just to do regularly. That's a really easy way to get into it It boils down to the fact that when you contribute to a to a project that you use then you're You're forced to look further than just the public api You're forced to look into the code in the vendor folder and understand what's going on under the hood And once you kind of know what's going on under the hood then You're an expert in that project, you know library framework, whatever it is if you understand how the code works Internally and you don't just use the the code the public api to call methods You're an expert in that framework or that project or that library And when you're an expert you get all the benefits that come with that expert And it sounds like i'm trivializing what it takes to be an expert, but trust me. I'm not I'm really not As long as you if you can understand if you use symphony and you can understand exactly what goes on under the hood Then you're an expert in symphony And when you're an expert in any project or framework it has a huge benefit on your career Effectively contributing Can help you to earn more money and that's a fact And it's kind of frowned upon in in these kind of community events to talk about money It's like oh but honestly I really like money And I'm earning more money now because I started contributing to open source than I was before I started Contributing and that's a fact. That's an absolute fact When you contribute to open source you also make connections with the other contributors Which is also really cool because those connections are really valuable to employers as well So if somebody says to you Oh, do you know how this works in monologue? But you can say no, but I know Jordy fairly well. I can probably ask him and get an answer fairly quickly Then there's value in that to employers So that's another way where you can earn more money by making these connections at the events you're in or making connections to open source And that's really cool You know that is I was surprised when I realized just how valuable these connections are to employers More importantly, I guess is that The connections I've made for open source has come on to become Real-lasting friends friends. I make an effort to go and see even outside of conferences or outside of php or development You know, and there's there's no value on that really. Let's be honest So, yeah, if we go back to ad spruce things had kind of had a downturn And I had a three month notice period to work when I gave my notice So I ended up playing some maim roms anyone know this one It's not daily thompson's a good guess Track and field. Yes track and field An excellent game Yeah I started working for a company called rove rove is um How do you describe rove? A high-end consultancy, I guess for zen framework zen framework doesn't have a consultancy brand attached to it like Symphony has sensual ads, you know, there's nothing there for zen framework. So we started our own company And it was this guy who I met a php northwest who Persuaded me to come and work for him, which is the best thing I ever did an amazing company to work for Amazing team of developers including marco Marco pavetti as I call him. I know his name is pavetta. I'm sorry James to come my go-to guy for a beer when I'm when I'm at any conference and I need to chill out James is always there for me. There's a few people at conferences who are always there for me when I need a beer to be fair Um, remember when I said marco's always watching you? There he is look Derek rethens another go-to guy for me for a beer. Um, and also derrick rodex debug and daytime So there's that in my back pocket when I need those questions answered. It's all good And kira mcgulty who's speaking here this conference who's another go-to Be a person and maintains php spec. So when I have questions about that, I've got that too There's a really interesting piece of trivia about kiran. Um, where are you kiran? I can't Oh right there in front of me. Hello There's an interesting piece of trivia about kiran Which I'd like to say is if you google so if you will say right on a slide deck and you needed a picture of kiran to put in a top drum card And you did a google image search on kiran's name. You get a very interesting result So here's a google image search on kiran's name If you can't see it, I'll give you a hint For some reason there's a picture of me pulling a bad face drinking a pint of beer when you google image search for kiran That's kind of scary Yeah, we're back to the main room. So I would love to say at this point that Life at rove had got terrible and I started playing main roms. That's plainly not true. I absolutely loved working at rove I'd go back there um in a heartbeat if you know the situation ever was needed but Because of of everything that I done. Oh before we move on anyone know this game Rastan. Yes. Yes. One of my favorites Rove it would have taken a pretty special company to come and let me move move on from rove And that company came with an offer for a developer advocacy job Her jet brains the company I work for now makers of fine ideas. How many people use php storm? Whoa Any intelligent ad counts. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of people Interestingly, my job is like really weird. I'm a developer advocate, which means like I get tweets like these pretty often from good old chris there But yeah, it would have taken a pretty special thing Cal Evans who I met many times at events kind of was the interface between jet brains and me So again, I only really got the job because of people I knew and I only knew these people because of my contributions to open source Um, it's so important to think there's a path for me being on this stage Talking to you with this amazing event from this first ever pull request and it's not, you know, it's it's a direct path I'm not saying this is um Anything but a very obvious path between me starting to contribute open source and me getting the job of my dreams, which I absolutely love And it will be really cool if you know, I'd love to end my my amazing talk there and have a standard innovation and everybody goes off and drinks beer That will be awesome, but I'm not going to yet. Johan. Sorry Because there's only a few more minutes or bear with me. I know everybody wants to attack the bar but There's a few other things that need to be said. So we've talked about my career and my love of money And which is legendary, but there's other things to be said Because it's not actually all about the beer and and the hot dogs and the money um Before I started working in open source. I was living in a tiny town a steel working town in south Wales Everybody looked like me. Everybody spoke like me It don't Who laughed when I said that Everybody spoke like me, you know, I I was guilty of of living in a very small minded small town environment I was I was living in a community where anyone different You know, maybe a snigger behind your hand and have a little laugh and a joke And that's not a nice thing to to admit But it's the truth, you know And getting out there and meeting new people has opened my mind amazingly And it's improved me as a person and that's a really important aspect to think about too Everyone in this room is doing it You're all here at events and that's like one of the best things that's ever happened for me And it's also important to think that it's not about the beer and the hot dogs. Oh, hello The hot dogs and the elephants and the money, of course um True north php a year A year ago not last year the year before I met um this big fat jerk chris hatches um the testing advocate Um my k-fib enemy if anyone knows what that means this man I love to hate on twitter, but Really nice to run into chris, but kind of more importantly And i'm sure chris won't like that, but I met ed finckler who Has been touched on in this morning's keynote and I saw his talk Where he spoke about mental mental health in mental wellness in the tech community I mean amazing revelation for me moved me to tears when I was sat there because I'd been keeping something deep down inside I've you know, I suffer with anxiety quite badly myself So to see ed Standing up on that stage and openly talking about it made me face my realization where I live in swansy now You know, there's still a lot of stigma around mental health issues and discussing mental health issues I had issues. I didn't even discuss with my wife my parents my my closest friends So to be able to actually get treatment for that which i'm getting treatment now and to have that life changing experience Because I met a conference is an amazing thing If you need more information about that osmyhealth.org come and find me at any point in the conference So I can always talk to you about that stuff, but that's really really amazing So yeah, it turns out it is actually about the beer and the hot dogs It's about the elephants and the bumper cars More importantly, it's about the money and the friendships I mean open sources changed my life and I know that's a really grand or statement to finish on But it's the absolute truth it really has from that moment that I first stumbled into an irc channel and started Incessantly asking horrible questions for people It's it's changed my life in ways that you can't imagine So I urge everybody to get involved I really do and there's plenty of people who can help you most of the speakers of this event Will be more than happy to help you if you want to start making a contribution I mean it's been amazing. So thank you very much