Some of you might already have noticed, others might not, but this year I am part of the team at Ibuildings that is responsible for organizing the DPC: the Dutch PHP Conference. As you can imagine I am thrilled about this! It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago I was just a visitor at the DPC, visiting one of my first conferences, and this year I am actually helping to put it all together!
Of course, I could not possibly do this just by myself. Just imagine what needs to be done: the website needs to be built, the talks need to be selected, the speakers need to be informed, the tickets sales have to be taken care of, the venue needs to be booked, the flights and hotel rooms for the speakers have to be arranged, the social event needs to be organized. Etc. Etc. The list just keeps going. Organizing the conference is a huge task and a lot of people at Ibuildings are helping to organize it. Luckily most members of the team are pretty experienced by now, as they have been involved with organizing the DPC from the very first edition. It is comforting to have such a solid base to rely upon.
I myself will be mainly working together with my colleague Felix de Vliegher. Together we are responsible for what I think is the most fun part of the entire operation: creating the conference schedule, communicating with the community and communicating with the speakers. We will also host the conference, which I think is pretty exciting. Yes I have spoken to groups before. Quite large groups actually. But this time I will be speaking to a fully packed room on the main stage. Cool! I suppose it is much like doing a talk – only this time I will not be talking about database version control, but about what kind of sunglasses we found on the floor of room B and when you will get your food.
At the moment we are very busy selecting the talks and creating the conference schedule. Together with a couple of colleagues we are trying to figure out which talks are the best ones. Not an easy task when you can only pick about 30 talks from 240 great proposals! I really enjoyed reading them all and it is interesting to see all the different subjects and ideas people come up with. It is sad that we will have to disappoint most of the submitters – but having them all would result in a 16 day conference or something, which would not be very realistic either now would it? 
). It’s time for something new! I don’t exactly know what it will be, but I have several ideas on new talks so hopefully I can make at least one of those ideas into a talk, and start submitting to the calls for papers at the different conferences really soon!