Over all the time that I’ve been a developer I’ve had people telling me that I should get in front of an audience and speak. However I’ve always suffered from a rather bad case of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ which meant my automatic response to those kind of statements has always been… I don’t really know enough about any one topic.
This is very true, I’ve spent a lot of my career learning a really broad swathe of technologies and techniques so I can turn my hand to any task that’s been presented to me so far. Even so people continue to try convince me that it would be a worthwhile pursuit.
Now that I work at Magma Digital I find that I’m often talking with @phpcodemonkey about all sorts of things and the topic of creating a talk came up while we were enjoying the most excellent PHP South Coast Conference. He knows I’ve been a Scout Leader for around 4 years now, and he suggested that I do a talk on the ‘Boy Scout Rule’.
I don’t know if he was serious or not at the time but it set my mind racing! This is a topic that I actually know quite a lot about!
So I’m now going to leave behind the Dev in Charge and have now rebranded as the PHP Boy Scout. I’ve already managed to pull together the basis of a talk on how Scouting principles can be used in conjunction with what we do as Developers and have a few other ideas that I’m going to work on over the next few weeks.
Fingers crossed I will be better at doing this kind of thing than I suspect I will be… but nothing ventured and nothing gained!