Did you miss CICON2010? We have a short interview with Phil Sturgeon, talking about the good, the bad, and what you can expect from the CodeIgniter community in future events.
EllisLab, “Phil, how was the first CICON?”
Phil, “There was a bit of a rocky start with some technical difficulties, but even with those obstacles, we had a great, productive first day. Kevin Prince and Joel Gasgoine gave brilliant talks that everyone enjoyed, and Elliot Haughin had everyone laughing for his entire talk with his extreme clip-art usage and randomness.”
EllisLab, “Were there a lot of beginners, or mostly experienced CodeIgniter guys?”
Phil, “We had a lot of experienced developers. There was a Q&A session where attendees could ask ANYTHING about CodeIgniter. With Dean and I together, we gave answers to loads of questions where I think everyone learned a lot of new tips, tricks, methods and practices.”
EllisLab, “What type of experienced users are you hoping come to future events?”
Phil, “The first conference was aimed purely at the existing community to get people together. We’ve had lots of feedback from people saying they now feel like part of the community when they hadn’t before. That’s brilliant and we want to keep that going for the next community but we also want to aim higher. The next round of conferences will contain two tracks. Beginners and Advanced. We may need to work on the names for these but the basic idea is we run talks and masterclasses for people new to CodeIgniter who want to learn how to use it, and for the experienced users we can show them how to do some crazy stuff that will help in their day-to-day usage of CodeIgniter.”
EllisLab, “What topics are you focusing on?”
Phil, “The two tracks will obviously involve some pretty different content. For the first track we’ll be going through setting up CodeIgniter, integrating third party classes and code, getting things running on different servers and explaining how MVC can help with your applications. The more advanced track will be focusing on things like making content management systems, building API’s, creating multi-lingual systems, building mobile versions of your sites, and more.”
EllisLab, “What kinds of demos are you planning? “
Phil, “We’ll be running some demos of some of the top commercial CodeIgniter applications out there. Like this year we’ll be running a MojoMotor demo with some hands on sessions along with demos of some new applications like Pancake (http://pancakeapp.com/), iClassEngine (http://iclassengine.com/) and others).”
EllisLab, “So you are planning many more conferences like this?”
Phil, “Yes! We’re going to make this a global event. There will be three conferences, Holland, UK and Philadelphia in the States. We’ve learned a lot from our first go and with all the community feedback, we’re planning an amazing upcoming group of master-classes, talks, code share and more. We’re really excited about the upcoming year!”