2 weeks ago, Ibuildings organised the fourth Dutch PHP Conference in the RAI centre in Amsterdam. DPC is a way for us to help PHP developers learn new skills and improve existing ones, but it is also an excellent way to get experts from around the world together and learn about current trends in the PHP ecosystem.

Tomorrow is the big day that everybody and their mother have been talking about for the past few weeks. The iPad will finally be available, albeit only in a very select part of the world. Some have shunned the iPad as 'just a web browsing device' or 'a large iPhone, why bother?' and others have hailed it as the end of the laptop.

I see the iPad (and the non-Apple alternatives that already exist or are on the way) as a game changer. It brings new ways of consuming content and will reach audiences that the laptop has never reached. Similar to how the iPhone had a whole new audience that had no prior smart phone experience, the iPad will attract a new generation of web consumers. Whether it's simply reading email on the couch, or using recipes in the kitchen or new ways of reading magazines (Dutch page, but watch the English embedded video, it's awesome); we are moving into a new phase of web consumption.

We haven't done much conference review posts, but since yesterday was our first time sponsoring and attending a Drupal event, and because I made some interesting observations from a PHP ecosystem point of view, I'd like to share my thoughts on Drupaljam.

Drupaljam is a community organized set of conferences around the Drupal content management system. Yesterday was the 6th Drupaljam and the largest to date with around 256 attendees. It was held at the Stayokay Zeeburg hotel in Amsterdam, conveniently located near a train station. Though the event had international speakers, the target audience was Dutch and it's nice to see that Drupal is able to attract such a large crowd in a small country such as the Netherlands.

One of the reasons so many people choose PHP for their web development is that it's fast. Not necessarily in the gazillion-requests-per-second sense, but in terms of developer productivity. One sentence you'll hear me say regularly is: "PHP is not pretty, but it gets the thing done, and gets it done well" and even in my 'PHP in the Enterprise' evangelization, the productivity argument is one I often use.

Every once in a while things happen that prove this point, and this is a post about such proof.

2009 just ended, and since we've only just commenced work in 2010, there's still time to look back at 2009 and see what events have shaped the way we work with PHP and what happened in the general PHP ecosystem. PHPdeveloper.org has a nice overview from a community perspective. I'll cover some community aspects briefly as well, but will focus on the broader PHP ecosystem, including its adoption in the enterprise and industry participation.

This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.

Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'.

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP.

And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. There's at least twice the amount that aren't notable, and if we count all the CMS systems that many web development agencies produce, then there's a whole lot more CMS systems out there.

In an article that was recently published by Finextra, we can read that spending on social media is on the increase. While this is an interesting article and I agree with their conclusions, they do not help managers decide on what to spend on social media and how. To avoid imminent Dilbertesque "hey, I've read that we should increase our social media expenditure, make it so." scenarios, I’m providing an overview of how I think social media should be approached.

What are social media?

Perhaps a question everybody knows the answer to, but since I encounter quite a few people that have heard the term but can't name an example of social media, here's a short answer anyway: social media are internet sites and applications where the core functionality revolves around the social interactions between people. The most well-known examples are Facebook and Twitter, but there are many more applications. Often these are targeted at a particular niche, to bring together people with similar interests or to promote collaboration. Wikipedia and Last.fm are examples of social media too. Where web 1.0 was about information, web 2.0 and social media in particular is about people.

With the worst of the economic downturn behind us, we're seeing an increasing demand for our services, so we are ready to expand again. We've had a steady growth since our inception in 1999, and have always been cautious not to grow too fast in too short a timeframe, which has helped us grow steadily over the years and remain stable even when the economy turned its back on us. This means that we often say 'no' to potential customers simply because we do not want to compromise on quality and stability by growing too fast. It also means that no matter how hard we're looking for new talent, we do not compromise on our recruitment practices and we have quite a thorough process.

In this post, I'd like to share a bit on what our recruitment process looks like, what we look for in people and what working at Ibuildings means for our staff. If you're interested to work for Ibuildings, read on. We currently have openings for medium and senior developers in our UK office, medium and senior developers and a project manager for our Dutch offices and finally several medium and senior developers in our Italian office. A complete overview with full job descriptions can be found on our website.

The company TIOBE, founded in 2000, is involved heavily with Software Quality. They call themselves 'the coding standards company' and deliver tools to assess the quality of software by checking coding standards, among other things. Unfortunately, despite the fact that their website is written in PHP, they do not support PHP yet with their tools (at least as far as I can tell from their website), but they have one activity that is of interest to us in the PHP ecosystem: they collect statistics on the popularity of programming languages and have been doing this for a few years now.

In their latest analysis PHP has entered the top 3 of most popular programming languages, and that is something that both makes us proud and provides further proof that PHP is still growing and here to stay.