Normally, I pride myself on public speaking. I’ve had the privilege of training folks at several of my last jobs but for some reason, today, I feel especially nervous about tomorrows presentation.

I volunteered (shoot me now) to present at the Chicago Adobe Users Group on how to get started with using PHP & MySQL. I know there is a misspelling in my name. Don’t worry about it. The talk is scheduled for Monday, 21st September, 2009. It’s a great group and the people there are very nice. The person who I spoke to about presenting, Mr. Michael Schaffner, is a very warm person who cares about the people in this group and helping them learn new things and to explore new things. I appreciate that in him a lot as there aren’t a whole lot of people who care like that these days.

Anyway, I’ve been working on my presentation and my whole goal is to try and sort of simplify things as much as possible so that the audience is more comfortable asking questions about things that are confusing. Of course, I have no idea if I’m successful or not. I’ll find out on Monday.

The example I’m using is an address book. Of course, no one actually wants to write an address book because those things serve no purpose at all. That’s what iPhones and addressbook (macosx) are for. But this example will be simple, direct, to the point and quick! That’s part of the goal too. I want to cover all my material and leave plenty of time for Q&A. Also, I’m teaching it as I learned it. Baby steps!

Here is my problem. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten better about my PHP and being around all the developers at work has made me realize the incorrectness of my ways. Now, I find it disturbing to write code that looks messy and is somewhat flawed. Maybe it’s an evolutionary process. Maybe someone who is just starting off and learning on their own is supposed to write code that has errors but works anyway. The more you write, the better you will become and the better you will become, the better your code will be. Is that possible? I hope it is. If not, this audience is doomed and I will be responsible for all of it.

It is my sincere hope that the group members will consider using a small amount of PHP on their next project and then slowly start using MySQL.

After the presentation, I’m going to make final tweaks based on the feedback and then post the zipped copy of the code and the presentation up here. Hopefully, my embarrassment will be short lived.

If it is successful, I’d love to present more talks like

  • PHP && MySQL II
  • Building a PHP && MySQL Development Environment
  • Flex for beginners (I’m not great with flex, I’ve only just begun)
  • Tomcat for beginners

Who knows. I’m excited and scared at the same time. But maybe that’s a good sign?

Update: The link if you want to register for it (sorry for the late notice) is at http://augchicagosept2009.eventbrite.com/ but you can find it from the AUGChicago home page too. cheers!