A few weeks back couple of my friends announced that they started a co-operative together called Analog. A highly talented group of guys who create web sites that will knock your socks off, and then some. The name is quite interesting, especially the meaning, to me Analog means personality, warmth, simple yet sturdy, tough yet soft, exactly what a company should strive for. I wish them all the best and good fortune.
One of the Analog guys, Andrei Zmievski wrote a very inspiring blog post about the journey the co-op went on, from idea to reality. There was one point in the post which caught my attention, where Andrei talks about claiming back simple, honest phrases like web sites and web developer. As Andrei puts it
They are precise and descriptive despite having been shunned or dismissed by people in favor of things like web application, front-end/back-end engineer, and other seemingly sexier nomenclature meant to sound more important.
Simple, yet a good point none the less. But lets not dismiss a completely valid term such as front-end engineer just yet.
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Posted in PHP | Tagged analog, developer, frontend, iceland, simple, web, web developer | Leave a Comment »
With Christmas over it also means the annual PHP Advent calendar has been concluded. As with previous years, there is a good bunch of authors with a great choice of articles, worth reading if you haven’t done so already. You can also read 2008.
I find the idea of article driven advent calendars absolutely fantastic, as it gives authors an interesting venue to write for and readers new quality material to read every day for 24 days. With a lot of my TV shows going on a break in December, I cherish the opportunity queue up a few quality article and putting aside an hour or two to read through, with hot chocolate. PHP Advent is not the only one I read, two other advents I’ve been keeping tabs on is the Web Design Advent and the Performance Advent, and you should as well.
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Posted in PHP | Tagged advent, design, performance, PHP, phpadvent, web | 4 Comments »
Now that ZendCon 2009 is over and I’m back home safely, albeit tired, in London after a whole week of giving presentations and meeting old friends and making new, I have an itch to reflect a little bit on the trip, reminisce if you like.
First I would like to mention the talks I gave at ZendCon and make my slides available, as I have been asked quite a few times so far to publish them but have no yet had much time to deal with it.
If anyone wants the originals they can contact me directly and I will be more than happy to oblige :-)
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Posted in PEAR, PHP | Tagged caching, conferences, Installer, Microsoft, ms, PEAR, pear2, PHP, pyrus, zendcon, zendcon09 | 1 Comment »
I just wanted to give everyone heads up on the fact that in a few days I will be flying over to San Jose to give 2 talks at ZendCon 2009.
I will be presenting Frontend Caching – The “new” frontier, which is all about how to squeeze the most performance out of your frontend and I will also give PEAR2 & Pyrus, the look ahead where I will talk about where PEAR2 stands currently and how the new PEAR installer is progressing (e.g. Pyrus) and how it will revolutionize your life.
Both of those talks I have given before on couple of occasions, where they have gotten good feedback from the crowed and I have been tweaking them along the way, so I hope everything will be in tip top shape for the ZendCon crowed! :-)
I would link directly to the descriptions of my talks but apparently S&S do not know how to make websites that are usable so I can’t without digging in deeper than I want to bother with! Sorry! Just go to http://www.zendcon.com/ and browse the agenda to see the descriptions of my talks and many other great talks.
I hope to see you guys there!
Update:
As Chris of the phpdeveloper.org and joind.in fame pointed out, you guys can see the description for my talks at joind.in :)
http://joind.in/talk/view/893
http://joind.in/talk/view/955
Also you can use that to give me feedback and rate the talk after I have given it, I would very much so appreciate that.
Posted in PHP | 6 Comments »
As the title suggests, I will be changing jobs very soon. I have decided to leave Ibuildings UK and my last day will be Friday the 13th of March, scary isn’t it ? :-)
I have accepted a job at echolibre, a company based in Ireland, where I will be heading up R&D, among other things, in addition of taking up part ownership, where I will be working along side great people like David Coallier and Eamon Leonard. If you are looking for a great company to take care of all your PHP needs, then contact us to get further information ;-) </shamelessplug>
I look forward to this opportunity and am very excited since I will be able to spend a whole lot more time on my open source projects than I have for the past 6 months, as well having more time for other side projects, such as writing columns and articles for php|a, a book and other exciting new things on the horizon (Keep tuned on this blog!). This new position will not mean a decrease in my conference attendance, so fret not – I will still come to the usual conferences and spread my joy all over the place and paint the town red!
I got a great office space in Soho, London for when I start at echolibre, so if any of you web people are located in the area, DM me (@h) or drop me an email if you’d like to talk business over drinks or just general farting about.
I would like to thank all my co-workers at Ibuildings for a great time the last couple of months and all the best in the future.
A co-worker of mine of Ibuildings UK Arpad Ray decided to leave at a similar time as my self to venture back into the contracting business, so congratulations are in order ! If anyone needs good developer than contact Arpad
Posted in PHP | Tagged conferences, echolibre, Ibuildings, PEAR, PHP | 8 Comments »
I sometimes get people coming to me and asking “How do I take my X code base and package it up PEAR style” or “So I have packaged up my awesome library, I want to have my own PEAR channel, how do I do that ?” so in the end I decided I’d just write articles on the subject :-)
If you look for the Nov and Dec issues of PHP Architect then you’ll see said articles in all it’s glory! I know people already have access to the Nov mag via PDF and I’ve gotten good feedback on it thus far, I’m happy.
I also published a little piece in the PHP Advent calendar for Chris and Sean called Coping with the Holiday Shopping Spree and in my opinion it turned out quite well, at least I’ve been getting reallllly good feedback from people. It’s a subject that people don’t touch on enough.
On top of this whole thing I will be starting a PEAR column in PHP Architect in February that will run on monhtly basis, where I will try to write something intelligent about PEAR and hopefully stay away from writing tutorials and how to’s for X and Y popular package but we’ll see how things progress, email me requests if you have a specific topic in mind ;-)
Posted in PHP | Tagged PEAR, PHP, phpa, phpadvent | Leave a Comment »
Now that Obama has finally won I think it is time to reveal the secret sauce in his campaign – PHP & PEAR – according to this article a LAMP stack was used to create the Obama site where PEAR was extensively used, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, ohh and really proud :-)
This just goes to show the Obama campaign picks the right tools for the job, and further they pick tools that no corporation controls, which quite reflects what Obama is all about – at least the little I glanced over the whole presidential election thing. The same can not be said about MaCain (read the article)
Posted in PHP | Tagged Obama, PEAR, PHP | 5 Comments »
I was just informed that Ohloh is now providing open source projects with a download service. While I haven’t tried it just looking over their FAQ seems like this could be really helpful to many smaller projects, well even bigger ones I think!
CDNs, ability to access the access logs, cli uploads as well as web interface – Really cool stuff in my opinion, not something we can use for projects like PEAR but I know countless projects that could make use of it!
Thanks to Scott Collison from Ohloh for informing me, I need to try this out as soon as possible to see if it actually works as nicely as it sounds.
Posted in PHP | Tagged CDN, Ohloh, PHP | Leave a Comment »
Now the PHP Barcelona 2008 conference is almost over, I am sitting in the last keynote of the day – Derick is talking about XDebug.
PHP Barcelona 2008 is a user group run conference, costing only 20 Euros for people to attend and it managed to garnish around 200 – 300 people, which shows that the PHP Spain scene is quite vibrant and alive. The conference was run really well and the venue is truly amazing, given people paid 20 euros to enter, everyone went wow as to the quality given the payment ratio.
This is a conference to look out for in the future and I for sure am gonna attend next year if possible.
I gave my Deploying website with the pear installer talk: http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/website-releases-made-easy-with-the-pear-installer-barcelona-2008-presentation/, I’ve updated it a bit and changed it, the talk it self went really well – ran 5 mins over, people seemed somewhat confused but I had really good feedback, both on pear and the talk it self … How I can improve them and in general good questions.
So hopefully they will have another conference next year, this one was too well run to not do it again. See ya there!
Posted in PHP | Tagged Barcelona, Conference, Installer, PEAR, PHP | Leave a Comment »
