It’s been a long, slow, lazy summer; but it feels as though things are accelerating in my life at the moment as we approach the launch of the PHPDiversity kickstarter. Mark promised himself that he wouldn’t proceed until he had all the costs associated with making me a reality (and knew that I was financially viable), and until he’d held the prototype me in his hands (rather than simply seen photographs of me) to assess that I really was what he’d expected.
Well, he’s been able to put those final figures into his spreadsheets now; and the prototype me is on its way to him even as I type. Assuming that it matches his expectations, he reckons that the kickstarter to make me real will launch toward the end of this month (October) or early November at the latest.
So all manner of things are starting to happen now, and things are going to get very busy around here. Last night at the PHP NorthWest 2016 Conference Hackathon, he and a pair of friendly developers (Ashley and Jonathan, with some help from Petra) starting to put together a PHPDiversity website, and create some “icons” and graphics for me.
I reckon that I look pretty good.
And in the fullness of time, my blog postings here will be transferred across to that new site when he puts it online, together with links to blogs and videos about Diversity, and lists of conferences that run Diversity Scholarship schemes.
He also did a talk on me, and on Diversity within the PHP Community, at the PHPNW16 Unconference this morning, the slides for which are already online as a reminder of what I’m all about.
This was just a short Unconference talk, but he’s also submitted it as a full-length talk (with rather more content and slides) in the “Calls for Papers” for a few upcoming conferences in the new year. By that time, hopefully, my kickstarter will have been fully funded, and he’ll have the prototype me to show everybody how good a Rainbow Elephpant is as a reminder about the benefits of Diversity in the workplace and in the community.
I’m really looking forward to that.
This post transferred from a post originally made on the blog site at markbakeruk.net on 1st October 2016.