ConfPad

The theme of this talk is leveling up: approaching membership in the PHP community to a degree that's appropriate for you based on your prior involvement. If this is your first conference, you'll learn how to get the most out of it, including navigating the talk schedule, the official and unofficial after-hours events, and how to keep in touch with the people you meet afterwards. We’ll also discuss the importance of giving feedback on the sessions you attend using joind.in and review best practices for how to write constructive comments. If you've been here before and/or are already a regular attendee at your local meetup, I'll go over how to deepen your involvement, including how best to support your user group, take a more active role in the conference scene, and start making tiny but meaningful contributions to the open source ecosystem. Finally, for the longtime members looking to make a lasting impact in the community, I’ll go over the highest tier of community contributions, which includes running a user group, technical blogging, contributing to open source, and speaking at meetups and conferences — and why the latter isn’t nearly as scary as you might think, even if you're a shy introvert like me!