I am delighted to announce our new public UK training schedule for spring 2009. You can take a peek here at the upcoming PHP courses that Ibuildings are offering.

The differentiating factor of Ibuildings PHP training is that you get the benefit of being trained by a real-life software engineer, so you can delve deeply into areas that you normally wouldn't be able to tackle (time permitting), or perhaps discuss your real-life application issue over lunch.

If you're interested in one of the training courses, contact us.

We are always interested to hear from the PHP community what needs there are, especially for advanced PHP training. If you have a topic you think we should deliver training on, feel free to comment below.

At Ibuildings we are constantly on the lookout for high quality people, who want to get involved in a variety of complex projects (and maybe some simpler ones). Although quality is hard to define, recently we have not just been looking for a long list of skills and experience, but also candidates who have the potential to play with the big boys, people who feel they can, one day, contribute at the highest level.

This has been an interesting exercise, although frustrating, sorting out the wheat from the (sometimes megalomaniac) chaff. The idea is that we are trying to 'spot' people early in their career, who have the right attitude and capacity for learning.

Why am I blogging this? Well, as we are currently a growing business, we need good people NOW. But also, in the longer term, we want to be aware of the good people out there in the community, and to be on mutual radars even if it doesn't look like we need people at that very minute.

It seems that on our 'PHP' projects, good Javascript skills are needed more often than not these days, and some of it is extremely complex and demanding.

Are you one of those 'people with potential' out there? Speak to us, get on our radar, and one day the timing might be right for us both.

Well I am nearly through one of the coolest weeks of my working life, this having been my itinerary, Monday to Friday: London, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Dublin, London, and LA.

All for a good cause, of course , selling the great Ibuildings story in a variety of ways. In the UK we run an intimate seminar every month, getting to the community and our customers. We try to give some theory and some practice, in the form of a talk or workshop, and presenting the Zend products (thanks to Mikko). So far we have had Ivo on Enterprise PHP (no surprises there), and a great workshop from Lorna on version control using SubVersion. We talked to nearly 50 people in Leeds and Dublin, and we hope to run these seminars once a month, if not more. One thing we need are topics of great interest to enterprise PHP users, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated. One area that we want to focus on is Zend Framework, where we could actually find many seminar topics.

Tomorrow a lucky few of us set off for LA for a brief road trip leading up to ZendCon. Since everyone there gets a chance to do the PHP Certification test, for some unknown reason I agreed to sit the thing, having never written a line of PHP code in my life. Watch this space, but miracles really don't happen. ZendCon will give me the opportunity to try and talk to every European voice I hear, as well as some serious bonding with our Dutch cousins. We'll also post regular live updates from the conference on this blog so stay tuned!

It is over a week since the Dutch PHP Conference, and I thought I would have plenty of time to gather my thoughts on the event, and put some wise words down. But since things are as busy as ever in the UK office, I guess this will have to do...

Conference organisation seemed top-rate to me - no one was looking lost or wondering what to do - all went very smoothly, and the sheer number of attendees was very impressive. Overall, people left with a great impression of Ibuildings, which is fantastic, and it seemed like our black polo shirts were everywhere, talking to each other and of course the community.

So we decided that in order to get to see all the people who are interested in PHP leadership topics, we should run an intimate seminar and invite our contacts along. If there is demand, we could run these every month. Here is the invitation that went out:

Free Seminar: Enterprise PHP and Zend

Title: Enterprise PHP and Zend
Date: 10th June 2008
Time: 9:00 - 13:00
Location: King's College London (Hodgkin Building, Guy's Campus
Speaker: Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings and leading PHP expert

I am delighted to be in the fast-moving world of PHP web application development. I thought I would occasionally put down some feedback from 'the field', as sales people call the (real?) world out there.

We are talking to many companies who depend on PHP for revenues, and who see Ibuildings as a natural partner and friend. They are delighted to find a professional, well-established organisation that backs-up the Zend products and initiatives with a trusted delivery capabilility.