Interview With Eric Van Johnson

Scott, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate it.

Right, great question. I appreciate you asking. It's really meant to be as less— as least stressful as we can make it. Essentially, there's just so much good information out there that we as developers hold on to. And we want to make sure everybody has an outlet, outlet to share that because there's just— it's just, it's just nonstop. Our, you know, our industry is always changing. There's always new things emerging, how we do things. There's no one right way to do things. So everybody has, you know, a thought or an understanding or knowledge of something. So if you're interested in contributing to PHP Architect, the magazine, you just simply reach out to us and it can be as casual as, hey, I have an idea for an article, is this something you would be interested in? Pretty straightforward with you, we'll give you a yes or no. Typically, if it's— obviously, ideally we like things focused on PHP, that's kind of our, always our free pass. But even if it's PHP adjacent, where it's like web technology or web development or something like that, even then we're— we'll, we'll give it a listen and kind of talk through it. You don't even have to write it. After that, all we ask is for the article to be ideally between 2,500 and 3,500 words. That seems like a lot, but really once you start writing, it flies by. It's very common that people contribute well over 3,500, and that's okay as well. Don't ever think you need to hit that 3,500. That 3,500 is not the high bar, like you have to hit it and then everything gets cut off. It's more like that's the sweet spot for us to get it in one release of a magazine. We've had articles, 5,000 words, 6,000 words, and all we end up doing is breaking those out across a couple of releases. Once we agree on a topic and you understand what we ask as far as a deliverable, you then tell us when you think you can, you can have it done. Now, this is not a hard deadline you're setting on yourself. It's just for us on our end, we add those articles to our pipeline and we can see, oh, Scott says in December he's going to have a feature article for us. Haven't heard from Scott, so we'll assume he's still targeting that December, December release. If you do end up having to postpone it and you need more time, you just let us know and say, hey, I'm gonna need another month, I'm gonna need another 2 months. It's really just so we understand if we need to find another feature article for that month. That's all there is, no pressure at all. And then that's it. Get your name out there, get feedback, and we work with you all the way through the process. We appreciate that you submit the article in Markdown. That just works best for our pipeline. Even better, if you, if you're familiar with the service Notion, notion.so, that is actually what we use to manage a lot of the magazine, including the article pipeline. So if you happen to use Notion or you're comfortable using Notion, you can do your article right there in Notion, share it with us, and we pull it right into our pipeline. The cool thing about that Is, as our proofreaders and our editors are reading through your article, if they have questions, they can comment right there in Notion, and you should get a notification that there's a question about something in the article. But we do a pretty thorough Grammarly check, so we, you know, check for spelling and grammar, make sure that It's kind of all looking good. And then we have proofreaders kind of go through and just kind of look at the integrity of the information. And the goal there is to make you, the person contributing, look as good as possible, like you know what you're talking about.

So John, my business partner, always gets mad at me because I always get this wrong. I always think it should be until the end of October, but it's actually until the end of November. Call for papers. Open. And again, great way to kind of share knowledge if you've ever been interested in talking at a conference. It's a great thing to have on your resume, by the way— conference speaker. People put it on their resumes all the time. But yeah, you just go to tech.phparch.com/speakers, and there's a link in there that will take you to the system that allows you to contribute papers. You don't, again, much like the article, you don't have to have the whole thing fleshed out. You can just have an idea of a topic. We have much like this year, so 2023, we were able to bring PHP Tech back as an in-person conference. We're really excited about that. It was our first time organizing PHP Tech. And went pretty well. But we have a little bit of a different format. We have every day. So there's your there's your typical hour-long talks, which is kind of like the kind of what a lot of people are accustomed to at. But every day we also have the slot before lunch. We have a half hour, and we found that a lot of times people have talks that they really can't stretch. to a full hour. So they, they aren't interested in submitting. But we do have a half-hour talk. We have 3 tracks, so that's 9 talks that are half-hour long. And then on the first day, instead of holding a whole— a completely separate day where we have maybe like 2 tutorial sessions, The first day, the second half of the day are 3-hour-long tracks. So if you're somebody who likes doing like a classroom sort of learning experience and sharing, you know, a big interactive sort of talk, that might be the solution for you.

So I come to it from the angle of, is this a topic I'd want to hear about? This year, One of the— some of the feedback we, we got from last year— or from this year, I'm sorry, years all mixed up— some of the feedback we got from this year's conference was that there weren't enough advanced talks. We are kind of trying to keep an extra eye out for more advanced talks, and you can rate— you can rank what you think your talk is from, you know, easy to advanced. We don't want to bury the conference with advanced talks because then we'd hear the other thing, you know, the people coming and saying, oh, this was way over my head, I wasn't able to get anything. So we are looking for more advanced talks. Again, obviously PHP-specific topics bubble up pretty quick, but we do soft talks as well. And again, adjacent web technology sort of talks. JavaScript, uh, we had a, we had a few JavaScript talks last— this year. Um, so yeah, I mean, anything much like the article, anything that you find interesting that you think others would find interesting, submit it. And you can submit multiple talks. Matter of fact, if you submit multiple talks in multiple your— of your talks, more than one gets selected, it's a much higher probability that you will make the final round. Because if we can get a speaker to give multiple talks, it helps us with planning and coordination because we have less speakers to have to manage. So, and so everybody understands the process a little bit. Again, not a fleshed-out talk, just kind of a summary of a topic I— a topic you want to write a presentation if you don't already have one. Our first round is internal to the team at PHP Architect. There's about 8 of us, actually, but I guess about 10 once you consider everybody. That first round is a complete blind review. We don't see the contributor's name. All we do is Everybody gets the topic, and if that topic is something that then the second round, you know, we we see of everybody who got selected. Are there any speakers who have multiple talks? And those are kind of the ones we look at first and like, okay, do we like do we like all these talks, or do we like you know multiple of these talks from this one speaker? And Then we usually, after that round, well, sometimes we'll bounce that round to the team internally as well. And then that's typically it. We try to whittle it down to the people we're selecting.

Yeah, it is. It really is. I promise.

I mean, if you're not a subscriber to PHP Architect, you should be. do so. Ideally, get your work to pay for it. It's— we consider it, we consider it continual education, and that is indeed what it is. So, you know, subscribe every month, digital. We do have a print version as well. It's nice. The print version is nice. I have a couple behind me here. I should have had it here, but it's really high quality. I like to throw them in my, in my car or in my backpack and just have with me. But yeah, there's always a digital version. And yeah, subscribe and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Scott's been putting out some great videos. If you haven't been following, he's been putting out some great videos. So make sure you subscribe. And I guess you're supposed to hit the notification button. That seems to be a thing the kids say these days.

I've been doing development for years. I mean, it's crazy how often I pick up a magazine and learn something new or something that interests me. It's just, there's just so much information out there. It's nice. And what's really cool, kind of the same thing about attending a conference, uh, with the magazine, I'll, I'll go through the magazine and even if I don't read the full article, I typically pay attention to what they're talking about. Same thing with going to a conference. Even though it might not be something I'm interested in or working with, I'll go to a talk because I'm just curious about it. I can't tell you how many times, like days later or weeks later or years later, something will happen and it's like, oh yeah, we need to do some event sourcing, and like a light will go off my head. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember reading about that in PHP Architect, and I'll go back through my by architects and try to find it. One thing that a lot of people don't realize about PHP Architect, if you subscribe to the, to the digital version, you get access to our complete back catalog. So you literally get all the releases from the beginning of PHP Architect, and we're talking since 2002. So that's a lot of magazines you get when you sign up for PHP Architect.

Yeah, I'm glad you get something out of it. That's always great to hear. I really don't get that. I don't hear that enough. I mean, not that people don't feel that way. They just don't think to Say, hey, appreciate the magazine. Got some good stuff out of it.

Thanks for having me, Scott. I had a great time.