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.

Now what is a web developer then? For me it is a person works with anything web related, be it on the front-end, back-end or in-between. If we compared it against another profession — Lets take teachers, saying “I’m a teacher” is very general and broad but a teacher can also say “I’m a high school English teacher” to further clarify their role. To me, the same thing applies to web developers, it is the umbrella role where front-end/back-end engineer and similar roles are subsets of. It is true that there are people out there making up roles such as “Social Media Expert” and other non-sense roles, only to sound more appealing and important.

I applaud Andrei for attempting to make web developer once again a commonly used phrase, and I feel like I can proudly say “I’m a web developer!” but I also feel like we shouldn’t dismiss valid job titles within the web developer umbrella, but leading with web developer whenever we can is a great idea. I might be a bit bias on the subject since I recently wrote about Designers versus Developers for phpadvent where I touch on what front-end engineers are, the role they play among designers and developers (web developers even).

Simple and pure is good when applied correctly. I can see where Andrei is coming from if we factor in the Iceland trip he mentions in his blog post, which I incidentally was on as well. There were a lot of moments during the trip where clarity and amazement dawned on us over the beautiful scenery we saw, yet at the same time it was simple — I can see the appeal of bringing that into business, to take us back to the basics and claim back simple phrases/approaches — Clearly something they are striving for at Analog.

And with that I will leave you all with a picture of the most profound moment of the trip along with the tweets we sent out at the time. A big turning point in all of our lives.

Photo by Chris Shiflett, taken the summer 2009, 2am, Iceland.

Reset my spirit underneath the midnight sun at Stykkishólmur. Feeling refreshed and renewed.

— Chris Shiflett

To echo @shiflett, watching tonight’s sunset in Stykkishólmur was the point of reset and restart in my life.

— Andrei Zmievski

The sunset outside of my old home town was amazing. Tranquility. Makes you think. I will be making changes in my life.

— Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

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.

I would like to applaud both Chris Shiflett (@shiflett) and Sean Coates (@coates) for starting PHP Advent and keeping it going. They do a lot of work that goes unnoticed, ranging from finding authors way ahead of time, to cat herding the authors and making sure everyone is on time, over to doing copy writing on our scribbles to make us sound at least mildly coherent, at least they did for me :-)

They are the men behind the scenes, so please show them your appreciation and drop them a line and say thanks, since we all want this to keep on going next year. Chris & Sean, I take my hat off for you for spending countless hours making this happen, especially during those evenings in December where you slaved over copy writing articles and making sure everything ran smoothly.

I would like to point out that I’ve been an author for PHP Advent for the past 2 years, so I’m fairly bias about it being so great :-)
Also a shameless self plug, here are my articles of last 2 years:  Coping with the Holiday Shopping Spree (2008) and Designers versus Developers (2009). I hope you have as much fun reading them as I had writing them.

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 :-)

The first talk I gave was about frontend caching and how you can get the most speed out of your website by optimizing the various bits of the frontend.
This is a talk I really enjoy giving and have but a good amount of work in preparing for, and didn’t spoil it that I got a full room for that one where people were very engaging and keen on learning about the topic.
All in all it was a huge success and I got a lot of good feedback from people, both in terms of how I can tweak the presentation and people just generally interested in knowing more, both of which makes it worth it spending time on making a good presentation! :-)

Here is the slide deck for the caching talk: http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/frontend-caching-the-new-frontier

My other talk was about PEAR2 and Pyrus and what’s upcoming with both of those initiatives, this one I was asked to give at a very short notice but I’m very ecstatic how it turned out, especially given the time constraints I had on various fronts.
My crowed was small, mostly due to the fact that Elizabeth Smith was giving her famous SPL talk, but I didn’t mind as I had a very good group of people and I toned it down into a more of a personal approach where I gave each person more attention and it gave people the opportunity to more freely bring up their questions and control the flow of my talk, a very nice change of pace.

The slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/pear2-pyrus-the-look-ahead

PEAR2 and Pyrus are definitely something for everyone to look at as soon as they can and something they will use in the future.
The future is here! Reach out and embrace it ;-)

Now with a big conference like ZendCon there are many aspects to the conference it self and how one can measure the conferences success, ranging from the speaker experience to the attendee experience all the way over to the social aspect of the conference and in between.
With ZendCon as far as I could see, most of those went over stellar! As a speaker I really enjoyed the conference and I heard very good feedback from people about the conference in general.
It didn’t hurt that Keith Casey organized a unconference for ZendCon this year and man oh man it was a success, a lot of quality talks and panels came out of it and it was to a point where some people attended more uncon sessions than actual conference sessions! Now if that is not success then I don’t know what is!

On the social side of things there were fewer conference organized social events than most other conferences that I usually attend and the open bars were a fair amount of joke, I’m sorry Zend but you get a minus point there :-/
But fear not, that’s where the whole social aspect comes in, the people around you will make it bearable and you will feel more inclined to chat with a random person just to make up for the lack of alcohol.
But as with any other PHP conference there were a couple of self organized social events in various bits of San Jose and San Francisco, where speakers and attendees likewise get up and figure out a plan to entertain them self, usually involving alcohol, and the outcome – A great social event with drinks at hand and great people to get to know and catch up with old friends.

In relation to the social portion above, among other things, I feel like I should make a special mention of Microsoft and the people they had at ZendCon this year.
Josh Holmes and Paul Treichler were the Microsoft guys that stand out head and shoulders above the rest.  Not only was it enjoyable to talk to them about the way and the world, but they were just as adapt and prepared to discuss what Microsoft were doing right and what they were doing wrong, in addition to talk about Microsofts competitors (One could say that in some cases they knew the competitors tech just as well, if not better than Microsofts, but you didn’t hear that from me! ;-)) on top of being socially capable and just fitting right into the crowed with us, be it at the bar of at the conference – This kind of diversity is something very few, but in increasing numbers, Microsoft employees poses and they are the kind of people that are slowly building up the trust and reputation of Microsoft with open source nutbags like my self, the reason being, they get us!

If Microsoft continues sending people like Josh and Paul to conference to interface with people then I’m sure that Microsoft will start gaining grounds again and lose their “We are all bad and horrible people” stamp they have.

And now to tie in Microsoft and the social bit properly!
While ZendCon was happening then Microsoft was holding Bing party up in San Francisco (remember, ZendCon was in San Jose) – And in an classic example of self organized social, John Coggeshall and Scott MacVicar caught wind of the event and started organizing for people to register for it and to find a way to get everyone there.  After a lot of pondering it was decided to get a Party Bus! to the event and back to our hotel.
One thing led to another and we ended up with a big group of people going up there and as it turned out, Josh made sure that everyone got into the event at Ruby Skye (The Bing party) and that Microsoft pitched in on the bus and also made sure everyone had a night to remember! The night was LEGENDARY.
So on behalf of everyone that attended that party from ZendCon, I would like to than John, Scott and Josh for making things happen!

I can just now hear people start thinking “Microsoft is just buying your loyalty!” and my simple response is, no, no they are not – This is just a case of a changed mindset at the company which helps facility for me and other reconsidering previous ideas we had about the company, its employees and more importantly its products – With the right attitude and directional change, anything can be achieved.

Anyway! So all in all, I would like to thank the organizers of the conference, especially Eli White! for a great conference, unconf people, the attendants and old / new friends for making it such an enjoyable experience and Microsoft to throw such a fun Bing party!
Now to hope there will be a ZendCon 2010!

Just as a final plug, a lot of people asked me where I work and what we do, so I’m just going to plug my companies website to simplify things! :-)

http://www.echolibre.com/ and our blog is located at http://blog.echolibre.com/
If you want amazing work done, contact me directly or any of the contacts details on the company website.

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.

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

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 ;-)

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)

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.

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!

So do come by to the conference, by the really small fee about 20 euros, fill up the conference and have a beer or 10 with us afterwards!
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

For the next alpha release of PEAR that will happen in 2 – 4 weeks we’ll have a min dep of PHP 4.4 and 5.1.6, so basically excluding 5.0.0 – 5.1.5 Now why am I going to do that ?

As any decent PHP developer know, PHP 4 is dead so to at least stay in the latest PHP 4 release I decided it wouldn’t be worth the hassle to maintain support for 4.3 anymore (It’s also the case with PHP 4.4 but I kinda dislike abandoning people altogether) and well 5.0 nobody uses except for crazy people and everyone in the 5.1 series should be up to 5.1.6 anyway since RHEL uses that and most of the LTS distros out there.

So yeah I’m doing this so I don’t have to test on so many PHP versions as well as hopefully nudge users to upgrade their PHP if they wish to use PEAR anymore … kinda … a little known secret is that the installer still works fine on 4.3 and 5.0 – 5,1.5, you just need to do pear upgrade -f pear if you want to keep on using those old ugly PHP versions but be warned, I’ll bogus any reports that has those numbers and I can’t properly reproduce any of the newer versions of PHP.

Now some people might be wondering things like: why didn’t you put PHP 5+ dep and rewrite the damn installer to proper PHP bla bla bla bla, well we’re already doing that and it’s called Pyrus and will be PHP 5.3+, the work I’m doing on the PEAR installer is because people will take some time to upgrade from PEAR installer to Pyrus once Pyrus is stable so I think it’s important we try to maintain the old installer for a bit longer and to make that easier for us the PHP version reduction was important, for us and I believe the community.

I’m mostly making this post so people know about this beforehand and can react accordingly on their own servers when the time comes.

Also does anyone have a beef with me excluding those PHP versions ? :-) If so comment here or email me at helgi _at_ php _dot_ net and explain to me why that is.

Zeev’s keynote was kinda like what Andi went on about back in Chicago – Saw the same slides in some case, history of PHP, where we are going and fun things like that, I know some people liked it but I must admit I was not impressed per se, maybe because I have seen Andi do most of this before ? Who knows.

Anyway on stage came Marco Tabini, a person I’ve never seen talk before and he had a interesting keynote title, Software and the taste of mayo, and I must say I was really happy with seeing how it turned out. Marco managed to pull off being his usual funny self and still get his point across, he talked about how software and services get over engineered, bloated and simply poorly written, for comparision he used mayo – real mayo is made out of three ingredients where as for example hunts mayo is made out of 50 or so ingredients which can more often than not be reflected to software and how they are handled. A good talk.

Next up was Derick with his eZc talk where he went on to explain what the whole concept is, introduced what I like to call their better components and show example but 45 mins didn’t make it justice, Ivo make the talks longer next year! And add another conf day :) This talk convinced me to look deeper into ez components and use more components than I already am.

PHP Security by Johann, I was expecting something different than what he talked about – It ended up being more like, not sure what to call it, a very dry university professor lecture, a lot of stats about why people are exploiting web apps, now and 5 years ago – names of some ways to run a security audit and basics about how you should do them. It didn’t catch my attention and I was really bored in there but people around me seemed very happy with it and thus I must deem it a success even tho I felt I was in 101 class.

The last talk I attended was Ivo Jansch session about Enterprise PHP Development. In there he used a nice metaphor about blocks to build a house in accordance to development , I must say I enjoyed the talk since he was talking about this I tend to ponder on a lot in projects I’m involved in but I was quite surprised that people in the talk seemed to find some of the topics Ivo touched on to be new to them. Good thing Ivo just published a book about it at PHP Arch.

I was going to end this blog post with something along the lines of “make the topic more advanced for next year around” but evidentally that should not happen since in many of the talks I looked into people seemed generally puzzled but I did hear the random “I felt I was back in pre-school”, so my advice to the conf holders, do a mix of both, add a extra conf day and everyone will be happy.

Terry Chay had his usual closting keynote, I was not all that satisfied how less explicit it has gotten recently, we need to get him drunk before these keynotes – Or he has to make a new one since he might be getting bored of this one but I still enjoy it :)

That night we went out for drinks and fun and stayed out for a looooong time, basic after conf stuff really but it meant we were a bit woobly the day after when we went sightseeing in Amsterdam, where we went on the canal bus and saw a lot of Amsterdam – Really beautiful and after that we went for a good stroll in this amazingggggg weather, wow I almost extended my stay just because of it – thankfully the weather was good in London too when I came back :)

Anyway this is a rather short wrap up but should give a good idea that I really liked this conference, good to see we still have a decent conference in Europe (unconfs not included in this statement :P they always rock) and I’m going again next year, hands down and so should you!

I wrote parts of this blog post during the talk so some of it talks about the session parts as they are in the future, I’m way too lazy to fix it but I do expect everyone that reads my blog is smart enough to just go with the flow on this one ;-)

Another reason why this session is interesting to me is because I’ve been dabbling in phpt all my life, everytime I’ve come across PHPUnit in a software where I have some say in it, I convert it to phpt BUT those are usually PHPUnit v1 which is well … not pretty – I used to use it in some PEAR packages, felt a bit over the top.
Having only touched on v3 a weeeee bit so I’m hoping Sebastian will bring some new light on this and make my mind a bit more open for v3 and v4. Quite funny tho when I was writing the above sentence that Sebastian was talking about that unit tests should be easy to write, I’ve always found the barrier to be higher for PHPUnit than for phpt, maybe it’s just me ? I have always believed that one file per test, it feels like PHPUnit encourages putting many tests in one file which kinda feels … messy, maybe it’s done because people don’t want to be extending some class all the time and fun fun things like that.

Tho as Sebastian points out, phpt is more of a standard and it’s not a unit test framework but in my experience it’s pretty easy to throw in most of the basic functions that people will use in PHPUnit, that’s something we did in pearweb – mock DB, assert funcs and all that but no doubt it doesn’t even start to touch on what PHPUnit does but most of the times you are only playing with the basic features, I’m a bit bias about phpt tho.

While showing how important tests are while refactoring Sebastian showed people how to solve code smells, a term coined by Martin Fowler but he added a little bit that I didn’t know about it, while Martin was writing it he had a new born baby in the household and his wife kept telling him “if it smells, change it” and so he went on to adopt it for coding.

A nice feature I wasn’t aware of in PHPUnit is tagging X many tests as a certain group and then having the ability to execute a group of tests in one file (kinda makes the many tests in one file sound nicer) or across multiple files, or so I believe from what Sebastian said.

Couple of other really nice features were mentioned like: DB_Unit – port of jUnit database stuff to PHPUnit, uses PDO only atm Selenium, cool as always phpUnderControl

DB_Unit and phpUnderControl are two things I have not tried out yet but I will for sure, phpUnderControl just looks awesome and I like the whole idea behind CruiseControl just never gave my self the time to look at it even if Sebastian has been talking about it for …. ever :-)

A bit of a funny tidbit, apparently there was a smallish bug in the html output from PHPUnit and Sebastian told us that this part of PHPUnit is nigh impossible to test – or maybe even PHPUnit it self as whole, didn’t really hear it properly and he’ll shout at me if he ever reads this and wants to correct me :)

The later parts of the post might look a bit … rushed … they are, I’m sitting here in a hotel in London trying to grab it all from memory :-) Mid through Sebastians session I became distracted with fixing bugs and other food related things and thus missed out on parts of the session, which was a pity, good session, really good.

I’m definently going to give PHPUnit another chance after this session but I’m still going to follow the PHPT.info development since it might become something really useful, after all it was born from the pear run test suite (which was born from the original test runner in PHP it self, so that we have the facts right, IIRC hehe)

a note to Derick, arrange a full day workshop of xdebug next time around! I had a real hard time picking if PHPUnit or Xdebug would be the session I wanted to see, then I noticed the xdebug one was a half day one … fail …

All in all, a good day – The evening was a lot of fun, Dutch won the France people, the town LIT up – Fun times

I had my usual train problem in Amsterdam since I always forget what to pick when I’m buying a ticket to RAI, rather weird not having it as an option in the ticket buying machine, oh well … Then I forgot to print out a map so I could walk from the RAI train station to the hotel …. I ended up taking the scenic route … something some of my fellow conference people should be familiar with, it’s a the technical term for getting lost :-P But I got to see some nice looking places in Amsterdam and the weather was really good outside so I didn’t mind really … Seems they finally finished the renovations they were doing around RAI btw, everything looked … different.

When I walked paste the convention center I noticed couple of signs, really cool:

Now I’m just waiting for some other people to arrive so we can grab dinner, I love the hotel location, smack in the middle of a lot of restaurants and what not.

Tutorial day is tomorrow, still haven’t decided which one I’ll be attending so my blog post tomorrow will be a mystery :D

I’ve been trying to find a legit reason to go to Amsterdam yet again (previously went in 2005 for the International PHP Conference – IPC) and finally decided that the Dutch PHP Conference would be the reason, not only because I liked the city but also because the schedule looks damn good, ranging from Derick R., Sebastian B., Marco T and over to guys like Ivo and the infamous Terry terror (cheesy ? yes ? no ? yeah probably is) and oodles of people I’ve never seen give a talk but sure have interesting topics, I’ve already pin pointed a one or two new talks I’m going to attend.

I really like the fact that the conference is held at the RAI convention center, maybe it’s just me but I liked the place and the location, not too far from downtown and not too far from the airport either and this is coming from someone where the capital (Reykjavík) consists of mere 120.000 people.
Nota bene, I do think the IPC made a false move by going over to Germany with both their conference events so I’d not be surprised by the fact that the Dutch conference is almost full so if you haven’t already then you should go ahead and get a ticket! It’s cheap and you’ll get bang for your buck, there’s not question about it … Now if you can’t attend this year then you should mark your calendar to watch out for next years which will hopefully be a 2 day conference event with a tutorial day (common Ivo, it will make it twice as fun! :-))

I will try to post more blogs about the conference when I get there and hopefully I can also do another community coverage like for Tek, I have a feeling the EU crowed might be a tad different than the one we saw at Tek, that coupled with some notes on the sessions.

Should make for an interesting read later on, so stay tuned! :-P

My trip had the same problem as always when going abroad … My name, but this time around they managed to write Oiormar instead of Thormar like they should have and thus I had the usual fun of being frisked by TSA because they have no idea what Thorn is but hey so it goes, it’s not like my passport has a ASCII verison of my name at the bottom or anything *wave hands for emphizing*

Before leaving for php | tek we inquired on #phpc IRC channel on Freenode how many of the people hanging around would be attending and a whooping 30 people were to show up which translates to roughly 10% of the overall attending people for the whole of php | tek if I got my numbers right, if not then I’m sure Marco will bet me with a stick and correct me :-)
10% of a conference attendees from a single community, to me that feels very impressive and just shows that the community is willing to come together in one place to make the community even more tighter and just make the confs a greate experience and it is always so much fun meeting people in real life that you’ve been talking to for a long time, even many years and you essentially call your comrades.

As Ben pointed out we did a great job coming together as a community at this conference and going behind anything I’ve ever seen before, taking new people under our arms, organizing events during the evenings and the days after / before the conference, the gimmick on the bar we frequent, Shoeless Joe or like I call it, Bootless Bill and just the over all flow between people.

I’d like to congratulate the conference organizers for the excellent idea of having a Rockband evening, it was AWESOME and I met so many new interesting people and I’m sure everyone did, which makes it an even more success, as well as I’d like to give thumbs up for those company sponsored open bars, who ever thought of 2 open bars in one night should get a gold star :-)

Another reason why the community aspect is so important is that we could all sit down together and work on code together, in person or just generally brainstorm about ideas, quick examples are the fact Joshua Eichorn, Greg Beaver (btw he’s not a script! Amazing isn’t it ?) and I could get together for a face to face meeting on the status of PEAR / PEAR2 and work on the new installer as well as the new infrastructure, we probably crammed months worth of code into 3 days on and off coding.

Another excellent example is the fact that we probably managed to bring down Twitter more than once by going bunkers on posting twitters, it was really hard to keep up with Twitter and #phptek on Freenode, which were yet another example of how the community could drag in other conference attendees and interact with them, some people are just generally shy and like to start with such a route.
Anyway so we saw Twitter die more than once and more than twice and more than 40 times and so people just sat down and came up with Stablr.net, admittedly an idea that many people have had before but being able to discuss it in person, with 20+ other smart people interested in the same thing is just amazing.

Then we had the flying elephpant project, parachuting elephpants from really high altitudes.

Just like Ben, I take my hat of to the conference organizers and the people that made this the most fun conference I’ve ever been to, just wow … people justttttt wow, hopefully next years will be even more fun :-)
I’d also like to thank Scott for tolerating me this whole time, if it were not for him then I would probably have slept under some bridge nearby.

Btw. for those that didn’t go with us to Howling at the moon in down town Chicago, next time you are in the area go there, it was a wild night I can tell you, riddled with competitions among the remaining people involving some peoples accents and dancing but thankfully nobody had a camera or such device ;-)
Without a doubt a place we should all go next year to!

I feel like I must mention 2 talks I liked a lot, actually they were both keynotes, the one from Joe Stagner a laid back session where people got to ask him a whole bunch of questions about MS and more, best thing about it was seeing people discussing on IRC what to ask next so we got some really good questions IMHO

And then there was Terry Chay … Terry Terror, first time I saw him present that talk and it was fun as it can get, worth seeing but don’t take your serious hat with you :-)

As anyone can see this is a bit half cooked blog post since it was done on a flight from JFK to Iceland but heck, I think the disorganization just shows how much we did during this one conference.

Returning early is a thing I simply love, it can make your code so much more readable with very little effort at all and the flow feels a lot more normal e.g. check for errors and return if found, kinda like airport checks, they check if you are legit at the checkin board and then at the security gate and each time they throw you away if you are not legit.

I’ve been battling with a lot of PEAR code to return early because some of the code can look like a maze, the PEAR installer for example, go see the blog post by Lukas to see couple of examples but here’s a big pet peeve of mine that I try to correct every single time:

 function bar()
 {
     if ($foo) {
         a lot of fun code
         return $somethingUseful;
     } else {
         return false;
     }
 }

Obviously this is a very minute example but it can be turned into:

 function bar()
 {
     if ($foo) {
         a lot of fun code
         return $somethingUseful;
     }     

     return false;
 }

this is what I call shit mixing but still makes it more readable but this way I prefer which is the way Lukas portrays

 function bar()
 {
     if (!$foo) {
         return false;
     }     

     a lot of fun code
     return $somethingUseful;
 }

Think I will try to push this into the PEAR manual one of these days if possible, makes things so much better.

Anyway we’re looking for some kick as students to apply to the PHP project so get your ass to the google summer of code page and apply your awesome mega cool idea :-)

If you lack ideas what to submit then head to http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008 for some ideas but we welcome new ones, so don’t be afraid about being bold.

This year we’ll be accepting PHP core ideas (internals of PHP it self), php infrastructure (websites and such), PHP-GTK, PEAR, PECL, PHPUnit and SimpleTest … Hope I’m not missing anything, but anyway if you are interested in ANY of those projects then please go a head and read the wiki to get a general idea of things and then make up a idea of your own.

Students can start submitting their applications to projects, the deadline is 31 March so get a move on people! I want to see YOUR applications in there or I’ll be hunting you down.

1st run – Code Intelligence tried to run and do some weird stuff but it hangs, so I had to kill Komodo, startup after that is snappy, faster than 4.2 IMHO

Search in all files = Slow as heck, installing grep and running it is faster (including the installation step), wonder if it’s like a first time cache it’s building up (debunked that theory, strike through isn’t working on this theme so meh.)

The slowness persists and is in Phase 1, gathering list of files and seems to also look in my PEAR dir for some reason; look in current project suddenly became current projects + include_path I think, could be the slow down, grep (like I use it) only searches in the dir I’m in (usually the root of the project) and down. So what I’d want is a new option “search only in current project” on top of the already existing feature :)

Would be better if it displayed results as it found them, seems to hold of for too long

The Asynchronous SCC part is going beautifully, I like it, was getting a wee bit tired of the UI hangups that 4.2 had

Haven’t given the new Unit Test runner a go since none of the projects I’m actively working on at this moment use PHPUnit but I did try to make a Test Plan and it’s not showing up anywhere and a closing Komodo and opening again doesn’t find it in the Project Unit Test Result tab but picking Project -> Select Test Plan does find it and picking the test plan updates the tab I mentioned earlier.

For the fun of it I tried to pick PHP as the language I wanted to run in and in the test command line I did pear run-tests -r just so see if I could cheat past the PHPUnit part but apparently it does not work, but gives me no error or any output what so ever, quite confusing, would have expected “Can’t run” or “No ouput”, “nothing ran” or whatever, but a alpha release is a alpha release.

Now if I just could find out how I edit or delete test plans, that would be swell.

When I have a folder open in the project view which has say, tests I’m running and they fail (phpt) they generate these .diff, .out .exp and whatever, seems to hang up the UI to update the view, same goes if I have one of those files open when I’m running the tests and the contents of the file I have open changes, then Komodo becomes a bit sluggish for a while, sometimes it’s just a second but sometimes longer, I guess it depends on how many tests I’m touching and how many of them are failing or succeeding after having failed (thus cleaning up all the extra files that were added)

Sorry about the hectic sounding post, I wrote this on the fly when I first tried out Komodo 4.3 :-P I’m going to hold of reporting bugs until alpha2 or beta1 is out and if these issues still persist then I’ll try to allocate time to report any of these bugs / feature requests and hopefully other people will enjoy the fixes that will come out of it ;-)