 Hi everyone! Let's talk about growing up in a PHP community. I have stage fright and trying to get rid of this by dancing on stage before and jumping. The reason I'm here is that I have something to share that I think is really important. So as code rabbi, another PHP developer once said, learn the most by sharing your knowledge with others. This talk is about experiences and everyone of you have your own experiences. And this is sharing mine and it will be quite a personal journey. So if my voice breaks during some points, you know why. And if my journey is not that interesting, at least here's a cute picture of a kitten. And my mum is a really talented graphical artist. She made this picture of me with a dragon. I'm Michelle Sanver. I'm president of PHP Women. And I do speak with an accent so if you don't understand me at some point, let me know and I will try to speak slower or try to clarify. And if the speed I'm speaking at is wrong, also let me know. I work at Leap. How many here have heard of Leap before? Cool. Two of you. I'm not a Drupal developer. I'm a symphony developer. I'm an API expert. And I love my job. So let's talk about PHP and why it's so magical. Because PHP really, really is a magical language to work on. In here worked with PHP 4 ever in their life. Okay. More than half of you. That's pretty cool. When PHP 4 came out, I was 12 years old. And I had just started using the language and started programming. I started programming when I was about 10 years old as an April of Fool's joke. I wanted to change the colors of my mum's display on random intervals. It was a lot of fun, and I loved doing that. Now, my first experience with PHP was mixing some PHP into HTML and trying to make some kind of website about myself and add this guest book. Because everyone makes a guest book as the first thing, right? And I had so much fun doing that. And PHP really taught me a lot of truckload. And then, I guess, I went on and I realized I needed to do more than just this guest book, and I started getting an interest. So then I realized, okay, so mixing HTML and PHP is not that good. So let's change it and grow my PHP and try to abstract it. So I made functions.php. And when functions.php grew to large, I made functions to the PHP. I realized the naming wasn't that great, so I made database functions.php. And now I felt like a professional developer, around 14 years old. Yes, quite cool. And then I started university and learning about object-oriented programming. And I loved object-oriented programming and fell in love with it. My code was the most beautiful abstracted mess I had ever written. And no one understood any of it. And that's the cool thing about PHP. You can do pretty much anything in it. I like to compare it a bit with an RPG game. So at level one you start and you have this new character and it's really pretty amazing. And you level up really, really fast. And you learn so much in such a short amount of time. And that's cool and all, but once you're level 60 out of 90, you start slowing down a little bit. And once you slow down, maybe you start another character and you call her Ruby and there you go. But this talk is mainly about my journey when I tried getting into the PHP community. My love for the language should be pretty clear now. PHP itself, it had many features over the years that really grew me as a developer. When namespaces came out and outloading, how many people here loved that instead of include? All that stuff was really, really amazing. But I was almost set back from programming and being a developer at all. So first I want to start with lots of hugs to all of you. You are all amazing. Yay! And let's talk a little bit about our brains because our brains is this really complex structure. Imagine that this is a brain, I'm clearly not a designer. And in here it's all your memories and your feelings and your past experiences, everything you do in life. And it's all connected. And everything you do, everything is just this emotional thing. And when you want to learn something new, let's say you want to learn Drupal 8, then you take from all those experiences. And because you have so many experiences you learn it a lot quicker. And it goes into this network of things you learned. And our brains are wired that way. Just what happens if you have this experience that's really traumatic for you. What does your brain do? So there's several cases. One of them is that you put this traumatic experience into your brain. And your brain kind of tries to integrate it with who you are and when you're learning new things. And it works out, you may be a bit sad when you remember those things. It may not work out for you that well. But what could also happen is that your brain tries to shut out that experience. And that's what happened to me. My brain tried to disassociate certain parts of putting programming and my code public. And it tried to not know what I was doing if my code had to go public. In private it was fine, in public my brain shut down. It took me a long time to understand brains and why my brain would do this. And then looking back when I was 12 years old it was kind of going to this IRC channel in PHP and using my name as a handle, Michelle I thought that would be pretty cool, right? I got kicked out of the IRC room for pretending to be a girl to get out quicker. So, okay, I could not be a girl in IRC, that was clear. But as soon as I was known during my entire career until quite recently I got statements like boobs to get the fuck off. Wow, a girl, you're an FBI agent, that's cool. These things, they happened to me daily and it got tiring. But those were not so bad. The worst thing was people deeming me and saying oh, there's not so many girls on IRC and especially programmers, IRC single. It became this thing that I still today get but very, very, very rarely. And what happened in the community is that these things became not so okay. Nowadays we have code of conducts and we have these awesome networks like we do in the Drupal community. And what I want to avoid is that we ever, ever, ever go back to an environment like that. So how do we avoid going back to this and what helped me to actually still stay in this industry and what will help other people to stay in this industry that is so much better to date than it was back then. One of the things that helped me is that my passion for programming never, ever disappeared. My passion for programming stayed and always stays the same. And one of the reason is the supportive parents that I always had. My mother a year ago and it's so important to support your children in anything they want to do. If the passionate about it, support them. Other things that really helped me in my life was when I was 18 long ago now and I went to my first conference after being pushed, really pushed to my first conference. And in there I got to meet some people I looked up to. They were really ordinary people like me. Wow, other geeks, that's so cool. And they didn't have this that a lot of people online had. They didn't say boobs to get the fuck off or anything like this. And it was pretty amazing and I was hooked and started going to use groups until about three years later where it didn't work out so well and I had a traumatic experience at a conference. But it's all okay and I'm not going to be ranting anymore. I just wanted to share some to try to kind of understand what it was like and to build an empathy for everyone in this community and that when something is said to someone who has experiences like today, innocent conversation really made my brain kind of shut down. So it was, we were talking about how I don't do a triple development. Oh cool, are you a frontender then? Oh no, I'm a symphony developer. Oh, there's not many girls in symphony, that's really cool. That's an innocent thing to say. But the thing I was thinking at that point was oh wow, that person really doesn't think that girls can do symphony, that's horrible. So we have to try to get into everyone's brain somehow and I don't know how that works out. So therefore I guess what I'm asking for is that we stop looking at groups of people and we start looking at individuals. Because individually we all have these experiences and our brains do these weird different things. Now back to PHP. PHP is pretty, pretty amazing and the speaker after me will talk about PHP 7.1 and all the cool features it has. I have an apprentice at work and at first I tried to teach him symphony and throw him into symphony, just randomly. Let's do symphony, you have never been programming before. That didn't work out so well. For some it does, for him, I threw him into the deep water and the strength with PHP we could say let's not do this, let's start over. That worked really, really well for him. So now let's talk about how I think we can fix this with all the people of different experiences and how we can be one unity and maybe try to be together as one and try to avoid people feeling earlier today from an innocent conversation. So let's talk about unity. Imagine you have 13 kids. 13 kids in school, it's a tweet that I saw and it explains it really well. Three of them were yellow t-shirts and ten of them were blue t-shirts. Now the problem is that six of the blue shirts start stealing the yellow shirts lunch money and the other blue shirts, they're just in between, they hate that the other blue shirts are stealing the money but they want to try to help but they can't, they just say it's not my problem, I'm not the one stealing the money. So the problem persists day after day after day but then one day the other blue shirt said we had enough and they unified with the yellow shirts and said okay let's not do this anymore, don't steal their lunch money and all of a sudden instead of saying it's not my problem because I'm not the one doing it they became unified and they could have a conversation and in this conversation they decided that okay the reason you stole the lunch money is that you couldn't actually afford to eat yourself and they talked about it and therefore they decided to all put all the money together and share it and everyone could eat and the goal here was to be green, yay, everyone's green. So community does work and community is really really amazing. I got a mentor in the community in phpmentoring.org and he taught me about code confidence I would start showing my code to him and he would start telling me this and this and this and this is amazing before he told me this little part could need tweaking and that's something that I wanted to introduce as maybe an example. We started doing this at work as well in our merge requests and we tried to always point out something positive so that the negative becomes less negative. So if there's one thing you can take away with you today start pointing out positive things that people do and notice the change in their mood, in their atmosphere and how much more productive they will be. If there's one thing you can take away, take that away. So community does really work but we need to be more positive and we need to hug each other more. Larry went in, so more hugging. Community does work and we can only only fix the problems together. So hugs to all of you. And now I thought we could have an open conversation last 10 minutes so if everyone comes a little bit closer so once at a conference in a keynote there was this exercise. How many of you have ever contributed to open source? Stand up. Yay! Applaud yourself and others. It's really, really cool. The thing with this thing is everyone stood up they felt kind of cool. When I was sitting down I felt, okay, this is horrible. I felt like I should contribute to open source but I didn't know where to start because how do you start when you feel the way I just explained. How do you start when you believe that because of your experiences and because I'm a woman in tech people will look at my code and they will judge it harder. How do I put my code out there and I didn't have an answer until we started with this positivity? So now as a group exercise does anyone have an answer how you do when someone feels that way to get them started in a project where they don't know anyone? So to repeat that for the recording what he said was to try to find people who have common goals and then you can work together. That's a really good point. Start with something small and controversial. That's really good. Anything else you can do? Identify people you look up to and talk to them have a one-to-one conversation and that way you can get involved more directly. Really cool. So the thing is I was sharing all these really negative things but it's really, really so cool to be here today because of the community and it's really nice that because of the community and only because of the community I still do programming today because of the conferences I went to and because of these people and my mentor I'm the person I am today so I would like to encourage everyone even if it's small just share something positive with everyone you encourage everyone you meet every cone you see share something positive about it and people like me will always stay. And also don't be the blue shirts in the middle because I wasn't pointing it out you missed the example. Because don't be the one who says it's not me always try to work together and bring unity I don't like when the segregated groups. Okay, any questions? Okay, so my fears before I contributed to open source versus how it was after I contributed to open source was it validated or how was it? So to this day I still haven't contributed that much to open source I did the easy thick issues it was really cool and I wanted to contribute more to symphony but to this day I still haven't because I read the comments and they are discouraging people say thank you but they never say exactly what was good and that's for me discouraging me to do my code either it's merged without thank you or there's only negative things and that's something I want to try to change if you take this away to try to have positive comments I might feel more comfortable contributing because I feel like I do at work when we started practicing this where we have positive comments I actually feel like I can code and that's something really really important to me I had a job interview once I was interviewing for a few jobs and I shall sleep because the only ones who made me feel awesome but one of the job interviews that stood out to me was a company in Sweden and during this job my potential employer asked me how would it feel to be the only woman working here and I said that would feel pretty normal that's my everyday job it's what I do but really we had a woman working here before and she wasn't a good programmer so we had to fire her and now everyone else thinks women can't code and we're trying to hire someone who can prove them wrong I laughed and said well I'm not that person well I wanted to laugh but I just silently walked out the door but still it's I can't blame them for the honesty but it's still a horrible horrible experience luck I skip ok and the next talk is going to be about PHP 7.1 which is something I have really really really fallen in love with so I was talking a little bit about this journey that I had from PHP 4 and how PHP grew I didn't get that into my talk that much but when PHP became really really open source and we started having type hinting that was really cool so thank you all and I would like to hand over to Ayush