Last year Jordi tried to get me to submit to phpDay and I wasn't able to. I decided to give it a go this year and was super excited to be selected to give a brand new talk ("Hello, PSR-7.") and a brand new tutorial ("Event Sourcing and CQRS with Broadway.").

The downside was that these were two brand new presentations. On top of coming up with another brand new talk for a conference earlier in the week ("Securing your HTTP API with Hawk" at #phptour) and losing my only contract in May made for a very stressful time leading up to these conferences.

I survived, though.

The conference itself was a lot of fun. I like conferences where the venue is in or very near to the hotel. It gives you a sense of "everyone is always there" and makes it easier to randomly run into people or schedule quick meetings with old friends without having to worry about them potentially being a long walk or bus ride away.

My first presentation was a tutorial on event sourcing and CQRS using Broadway. This was my first chance to try out showing these technologies so I was excited about it. One small hitch a day before was that I discovered that I didn't have three hours for the tutorial but only two! There was a lot of ground to cover so I wasn't sure how well this was going to work out.

This is one thing I've found hard to deal with as I've been speaking at different conferences. Everyone does schedules differently and I find I don't always read the schedules right. 45 minute slot? OK! But does that include questions? I see a 15 minute break between talks, does that mean questions can happen between the breaks or ...?

I haven't actually missed a slot yet, but I've had to rush and cut or add 15 minutes here or there several times.

The tutorial itself went reasonably well. The feedback I got was that it was fast but that it was easy to follow and delivered a lot of relevant information. This made me happy. I had put a lot of work into preparation on this tutorial (a ton of code on top of the slides) so I was glad the format worked.

I enjoyed the speaker dinner as much as I could. I should have enjoyed the speaker dinner night more as the phpDay team tried hard to make it nice. I was too anxious about the situation and about the talk I needed a lot of work to be done before I delivered it first thing the next morning.

The PSR-7 talk went well and I was quite pleased with that. I hadn't been sure how to present it but decided on a direction and went with it. The reviews were pretty solid and people seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.

PSR-7 was 3 days out from being accepted at that point so it was very timely.

I felt pretty good about my performance at phpDay. I'd love to go back to phpDay again and maybe spend more time exploring Verona and being a little more social. Preparing three brand new talks and tutorials back-to-back took a huge toll on me and had a big impact on my engagement levels at both #phptour and phpDay.

I'd love to attend phpDay again in the future! My hope is that next time I'll be able to spend more time engaging with the community and not spending as much time being anxious, worried, and fiddling with my presentations.