The CloudWays blog has posted their latest in their series of interview with members of the PHP community. In their latest they talk with Ligaya Turmelle about PHP Women, Oracle, MySQL and php[tek].

Ligaya Turmelle is a MySQL support engineer at Oracle and a co-founder of PHPwomen. She has also attended Oracle conferences as a speaker. In this interview, she shares her experience as a speaker and has also offered her advice on creating a schema of a database and deploying it.

In the rest of the interview Ligaya answers questions about:

• When and why she made the switch from PHP to database developer
• Some of her advice as a speaker to those wanting to speak
• What some of her key roles are at Oracle working with MySQL
• Suggestions for optimizing databases and preventing them from becoming "resource hogs"

Be sure to check out the full interview for her answers to these and other questions.

On 7PHP.com today Khayrattee Wasseem has posted another community interview - a bit different this time - with both Michelle Sanver and Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems about the "relaunch" of the PHPWomen community support group. This is another in the "PHP User Group" series.

The 8th of October, 2006 as a call for the women of PHP to “stand up and be counted” Ligaya Turmelle and Elizabeth Naramore founded PHPWomen. Since this time, PHPWomen has grown as a group and now has an active community spanning the globe. [Recently, they've changed] leaders where Elizabeth and Lig are still in the board, but Michelle and Lineke are the new co-presidents. There’s also three new European board members, meaning the board is more even in American and European members. We’re actively working on promoting PHPWomen with our website and physical presence at conferences and we are currently busy planning for CodeConnexx in November.

The interview covers a wide range of topics centered around the group including:

• Future plans for the group
• The size of the group
• What they're doing to give back to the community
• More about the CodeConnexx conference
• Some thoughts from Cal Evans and Michelangelo van Dam about the PHPwomen group

For more, check out the full interview here.

In their latest podcast Engine Yard (as hosted by Davey Shafik) talks with Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems and Michelle Sanver about the future of PHP Women, a group within the PHP community to help encourage women in technology and support the PHP community overall, regardless of gender.

Among the topics discussed in this episode are things like:

• The official mission of PHPWomen
• How to get involved
• Future plans for the group
• A mention of the CodeConnexx conference (Europe edition)

You can either listen to this episode through the in-page player or you can subscribe to their feeds to get this and other episodes - iTunes, RSS.

On 7PHP.com today they've posted the latest interview with a member of the PHP community. In this edition the interview is with Lineke Kerckhoffs Willems, co-founder of the ProTalk video and audio community resource.

In this edition I talked with Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems who is the Co-Founder Of ProTalk. @the_linie is the third #phpwomen I’m hosting on 7php.com after Lorna and Ligaya. Lineke is a very active member of and promoting the purpose of PHPwomen.org. She is indulged in a lot of stuffs; she attends a lot of conferences, speaks at conferences and is also an organizer of a conference as you will read along this interview. She focuses a lot on Quality Assurance and I have taken this opportunity to ask her a few questions about it.

They talk about a wide range of topics in the interview including:

• Het background as a developer, open source project lead, author and conference organizer
• Her opinions (good and bad) about the PHP language
• Her development tools of choice
• Some of her thoughts on quality assurance
• Details about ProTalk's goals and the technology that powers it

You can read the answers to these and the rest of the questions in the full interview.

7PHP.com has posted its latest in their series of interviews with members of the PHP community. This time they talked with Ligaya Turmele, a co-founder of the PHP Women group and speaker.

In this edition I talked with the full time Goddess, Ligaya Turmelle who is the Co-Founder Of PHPwomen.org – The PHP Women User Group. [Ligaya @lig] is also the Principal MySQL Technical Support Engineer at Oracle. She has been speaking at so many conferences namely ZendCon, PHP|tek, Day Camp for Developers, Zend PHP Conference; and she will soon speak at the incoming hot SunshinePHP Conference (organized by Adam Culp) scheduled for February 8-9 2013 where she will talk about ‘Replication with MySQL‘.

Her answers mention a few things like:

• her relationship with the PHP community
• recommendations she has for people wanting to learn more about PHP
• how small decisions have effected her life
• her picks for best conferences
• her "good" and "bad" list for things that happen at conferences

You can read the full interview here.

As Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems has posted to the PHP Women site today, the Ada Initiative, an organization that supports women in technology, is looking for donations to help improve the work they can do for women all around the world.

Over a year ago I first heard about the Ada Initiative, an organisation to support women in open technology and culture. This is exactly why PHPWomen was founded, only we narrow it down to women within the PHP community, because that is our level of expertise. However, we are an organisation based on volunteers and therefore, we often struggle with finding the time to do more. Luckily, The Ada Initiative isn’t based on volunteers, but on people working full time to reach their goal, our goal. We share their vision: “a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture” and therefore we support the organisation.

As they are a non-profit, they can use all of the financial support they get to help further their cause. There's one catch to donating - the campaign ends tomorrow, October 31st. If you want to contribute to the cause (they've already collected over $73,000) you can do it here.

We know you care about women in the PHP community, and technology as a whole, as much as we do. Donating to the Ada Initiative is an easy way to help and our community is based around helping others. Will you donate too?

There's a new conference happening in November (in Indianapolis, Indiana) brought to you by the group behind PHPWomen and EngineYard - the CodeConnexx conference.

CodeConnexx is a two-day, one track conference that aims to bring together men and women of all ages, races, backgrounds, and skillsets interested in talking about code. As we know, choosing a career as a coder comes with its own sets of life challenges, and we want to talk about those too. In short, this conference is a different kind of conference, as it connects those two pieces of the puzzle together in one event.

It's a two-day event happening November 8th and 9th and registration is now open - tickets can be purchased for $99 USD. There's lots of great topics being covered over the two days including:

• "Getting Started Contributing to Open Source"
• "Mentoring Developers"
• "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Deployment but Were Afraid to Ask"
• "Grokking REST"

Additionally, they're doing something interesting for those that have children and want to attend - childcare will be provided on site.

On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new post talking about two of the group's members - Ligaya Turmelle and Lorna Mitchell that will be participating in the second installment of the Day Camp 4 Developers series. This time the focus is on telecommuting.

I bring this up *not just* because it will be a great conference on a subject that is "the holy grail for many developers" - Telecommuting, but also because it will again have 2 of our members in the 5 speaker lineup - Ligaya Turmelle and Lorna Jane Mitchell.

Ligaya will bespeaking on keeping the work and life balance intact despite working from home and Lorna offers a few suggestions for you to answer the question "Could You Telecommute?". The Day Camp 4 Developers even happens Saturday, March 5th and lasts all day. There's a few different ticket options ranging from just the event out to an "Office Party" for more than one attendee.

According to a new post to their blog, the PHPWomen group has announced a partnership program for projects that want to put out a message of encouraging diversity in contributors:

As quoted from the information page about the partnerships:

PHPWomen has launched a partnership program for open source projects that are committed to embracing diversity and providing a welcoming and friendly atmosphere for contributors. We work closely with project leaders to identify specific areas of need, and will actively encourage our members to participate by promoting those needs through various channels. In return, the project leaders will ensure that newcomers to their projects will be welcomed and their contributions appreciated. This includes fostering an open and friendly environment for all newcomers, not just females.

The goal of the project is to encourage inviting environments for open source projects where developers feel like they're given a chance to contribute equally and to provide something more specific than "here's a project that needs help - go for it".

There's already several projects that are on the list including Spaz and the PHP Documentation team. You can find out more specifics on what they're looking for in contributions on the Opportunities page.

The PHPWomen have officially announced that they will have a presence at this year's PHP UK Conference (2010) and will have a stand in the exhibition hall for those interested in the group or just want to stop off and say hello to attending members.

The PHP UK Conference is now in its fifth year and is bigger and better than ever. Friday’s event has 16 different hour-long talks covering a plethora of topics from some of the world’s best PHP speakers. [...] PHPWomen is a community partner of the event and will have a stand in the exhibition hall amongst a variety of other exhibitors.

Two members will be speaking at the event - Juliette Folmer and Lorna Mitchell - and there's a special offer for PHPWomen members that still haven't purchased their tickets. If you register through this link, you can get an automatic £20 discount off the normal ticket price (now going for £120). You can get more information about the conference from the main PHP UK Conference website.