N Ways To Be A Better Developer

Recently I had the honour of opening the phpnw conference with a keynote entitled “0x0f Ways To Be A Better Developer”. I co-presented with my good friend and ex-colleague Ivo Jansch, across two rooms with one speaker in each room and video links in both directions – a slightly scary prospect for the presenters, but in the event it turned out to be good fun!

Our aim was to share our collective experiences of seeing the growth of our own careers and those of the people we’ve known and worked with over the years. There are some patterns that really do make a difference and we wanted to give other developers the opportunity to benefit from what we’ve seen rather than having to spend years working it out for themselves! We shared tactics, stories, and hopefully confidence that there are plenty of things that the average developer can do to keep growing and, um, developing.

The constraints of a 45 minute talk was frustrating to us, so we decided that we’d also like to try this idea in a different format: a book. The book gives us the freedom to write as much or as little as we please on the various topics we choose – it also means we can both come in, which we do in many chapters. We can also include some of the points that didn’t make it into the talk, new ideas that come to us over time, and whatever else. This of course means that we have no idea how many “ways” will eventually get into the book … and so the title is simply “N Ways” :)

You can find out more about the book, download sample chapters, or even buy it at http://nwaysbook.com.

Lorna Jane Mitchell is a web development consultant and trainer from Leeds in the UK, specialising in open source technologies, data-related problems, and APIs. She is also an open source project lead, regular conference speaker, prolific blogger, and author of PHP Web Services, published May 2013 by O’Reilly.