Details matter

on February 19, 2018. in Blablabla. A 2 minute read.

Last week on Thursday the lovely people from Zagreb PHP had me over for a talk. I presented my new talk called “All aboard the Service Bus”. I gave this talk once before at the PHP Srbija meetup in January. I’ve reused the slides, made some minor adjustments based on the feedback I received in Belgrade, and of course updated the footer.

The version from Belgrade had “Robert Basic - PHP Srbija #29” and the version from Zagreb had “Robert Basic - ZGPHP #78” in the footer.

The talk went well. I was a bit tired, as I drove 5 hours, my mind was racing a bit more than what I’d like, but all in all, I was/am very happy with how the talk went.

When I was done with the talk in Zagreb, people came up to me, said it was a nice talk, gave me some feedback, and then asked what’s up with the “29”, where did I get that number? I was confused. What? “29”? I don’t have any numbers on my slides, let alone a specific number like “29”.

“ZGPHP 29, in the footer”, said Luka, “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking what does it mean.”

I somehow managed to update only one part of the footer — changed the user group, didn’t change the meetup number. I apologized, explained, and shrugged it of. It’s just a number in the footer after all, has nothing to do with the actual talk.

On the drive back home, my mind kept going over it again and again.

It might be just a number, a small detail, but a detail that was incorrect, a detail that Luka noticed, a detail that made him think about that number 29 instead of paying his full attention at the actual talk.

Details matter.