Mentoring
The Symfony community wants everyone to feel welcome and supported, whether you're making your first contribution or giving your first conference talk. These mentoring programs connect you with experienced community members who are happy to help.
Contributor Mentoring
Reading the contributing guides is already a great way to get started on becoming a Symfony contributor. However, it can still seem overwhelming: contributing can be complex! For this reason we created a dedicated #mentoring channel on the Symfony Slack to connect new contributors with long-time contributors. This is a great way to get one-on-one advice on the whole process. These long-time contributors truly want to help new contributors, so feel free to ask anything!
Speaker Mentoring
The Symfony community benefits greatly when as many people as possible share their knowledge and experience with others. Every different point of view adds to our collective understanding of how to best use and evolve the code, design patterns and architecture provided within the Symfony community. Because of this, we specifically want to hear from long-time contributors and new users, who often come across entirely different challenges with a totally fresh new perspective.
Giving a first talk at a conference can seem quite intimidating. But don't worry! Every speaker went through the same process at one time. We want to make sure that as many people as possible are empowered to take this path if they are motivated.
Tip
A good first step might be to give a talk at a local user group to a smaller crowd that you know more intimately. A next step could be to give a talk at a conference in your first language.
The best way to find people that can review your talk idea or slides is the #speaker-mentoring channel on the Symfony Slack. There are many seasoned speakers with knowledge in various parts of Symfony that are motivated to help you get started on your path towards becoming a public speaker. They can even do practice runs via video chat, and be an ally on the day of the talk!
A great resource with advice on everything related to public speaking is a collection of links maintained by VM (Vicky) Brasseur. It covers everything from finding a conference call for proposals and refining a proposal, to putting together slide decks and practical tips for preparation and talk delivery.