A short time ago I somehow found myself helping out with the organizing of CICON 2011 in New York City this August (CodeIgniter Con, for those not in the know).
Aside from some little things here and there for the website and getting to talk to the awesome people at Ellislab, I volunteered to make a video to promote CICON with interviews from other CI developers and CI community members. Check it out below:
First a side note for people into video: if you are going to do interviews via Skype, do some tests first. The video was recorded with iShowU, and when the audio didn’t want to work (which was 90% of the time), the audio was recorded with Audio Hijack Pro (also our jam for the FilmedInsert podcast). Due to my stupidity, I found myself spending hours and hours synching audio and running video through export processes (thank you MPEG Streamclip) to get it all to work. FCP did some things I’ve never seen it do before, but I eventually got it all to work.
Anyways, it was really cool to talk to everyone, and the whole process reminded me why I love being a CodeIgniter developer – CI people are really nice/fun people. I had some experience before from interviewing people during EECI2009 in San Francisco, but it was neat to get people in their natural habitat (at a computer) and get an idea of where they are coming from as developers and why they are a part of the CI community.
The idea of this first video is to get you fired up about CICON. I think it’s really interesting to see that for even the guys at the top of the stack, CI really shaped the way they developed and was an important moment in their development history. I know it was for me, so it was really fun to see how many parallels existed between everyone when editing it together to tell a story. This was actually a relatively easy edit once the technical challenges were dealt with – people even finished each other’s sentences.
If you are a fan of CI, you probably recognize the man who appears first in the video – Rick Ellis. Ellis created CodeIgniter originally, and I thought it was a fitting intro to start with an “origin story” where a few months at the end of the year turned into something much bigger. You can tell when Rick says “and then I released it…” he is trying pretty hard not to say “…and guess how that turned out, BIATCH”.
The bottom line is – if you are a CodeIgniter developer, seriously consider making it out to NYC or London for CICON2011. The talks are going to be fantastic, and if you couldn’t tell from this video, the people that are going to be there are a great group to argue over if CI should have a cart class with.
Watch out for some more videos for CICON coming up soon! There was a lot of video material, so we will release some more videos on different subjects coming up.
