On Friday night in Cancun, Mexico at the third Joomla World Conference I presented an Ignite session. Ignite is a presentation format where you have 20 slides and only 15 seconds before each slide changes. What I actually said on the night you will have to wait for the video but this is what I intended to write.
This is my family - they are all lawyers and the one in the middle is a judge. 9 and half years ago lawyers like them gave me some advice - Keep quiet - don’t say anything until you have made all your decisions - That was wrong and bad advice.
There is a growing trend for software to automatically update without any notification, authorisation or backup. This sucks!!! Let me tell you why.
I love Joomla. I live Joomla. I love to introduce new people to Joomla. I love to show people how to achieve the impossible no matter how improbable they think it is. We need more people who do this and more people who can do this.
I get excited showing people what they can achieve with Joomla. I get excited meeting people who have never heard of Joomla and Open Source software and showing them the benefits.
A 10 step guide to being a better Joomla lover
On Monday this week I was honoured to be one of the keynote speakers at JoomlaDay Israel. As I stood on the stage in front of a packed lecture theatre one thing came to my mind. Diversity!!!
When I was 13 years old Monty Python released the movie "The Life of Brian". What a pain! All through my teenage years fans of the movie, and there were a lot in England, would walk up to me and shout " Brian, he's not the messiah he is a very naughty boy". (If you've not seen the movie you really should). Trust me on this after the tenth time it really isn't very funny.
The closing scene of the movie is the song " Always look on the bright side of life!" It's a noble aim and is analogous to the concept of the glass being half full instead of half empty. Always look for the positives instead of concentrating on the negatives.
Every year I attend more tech events than I care to count and every year at this time (just before my birthday) I go through my closet, collect all the "souvenir" t-shirts and donate them to a local homeless shelter.
Official event t-shirts are a pretty cool reminder of the events that you've attended and some of them are even designed well enough that you are happy (and even proud) to wear them again in the future.
But what about all those t-shirts given away by event sponsors that are nothing but adverts. Do you really need them? The photo above was posted on twitter by one person of their personal SWAG collection from just one day at a tech event.
Yesterday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day of remembrance, repentance, confession and fasting. It is unique in that it is almost universally observed, even by the most secular of Jews for whom it might be the only day of the year that they attend a service.
Central to Yom Kippur is the Al Chet prayer where we are asked to consider the sins we have committed intentionally or unintentionally, what are our sins of commission and our sins of omission and what have we done inadvertently by doing nothing at all.
9 years ago today, on 17th August 2005, I was just one of seventeen brave (or foolhardy) people who announced that they were leaving the very successful Mambo project and starting out on their own. It was a snap decision and truth be told if we had stopped to think about how much work lay ahead of us in the coming months I suspect we might not have been in such a rush. We were greatly helped at the time by Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Centre and I believe we were their first "clients".
I arrived at J & Beyond not in the best of moods. I'd been off work sick for the previous month and to be honest I was tired, run down and a little depressed. There are just times when things become a constant battle of frustration and nothing seems worth the effort and that's exactly where I was. After months of preparation for JAB14 I was no longer interested and was determined that this would be my last JAB and probably my last Joomla event. Mood 0/10
I had convinced my JAB teammates to introduce two new features for 2014 and I was no longer certain that the Make it Happen or J!Factor events would be a success. I didn't see the commitment and support from the community that I felt these two initiatives deserved and as they were intended to be a major focus this year I just felt JAB would fall flat on its face together with any reputation I might have established for being involved in successful events.
