Vrijdag, 11 september 2009
The children's Bible song starts off with the line "Oh be careful little eyes what you see". Regardless of whether you agree with the religious doctrine behind the song, the advice from the first line is, none-the-less, applicable to the PHP community these days.
The web has made it easy for anyone to become an instant pundit, regardless of their background. The tools exist so that anyone can quickly and easily publish anything and call it a fact. Nowhere is this problem more visible than in the software development community at large and the PHP community in specific.
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Woensdag, 2 september 2009
10th October 2009 sees the second annual PHP Conference to be held in Manchester, PHP North West. As one of the organisers I've been watching the arrangements come together with growing excitement: this year we have a new venue, a schedule literally packed with excellent sessions, plenty of social activity, and some community-driven input on Sunday morning - I'll even be speaking myself this year. Some of the topics at this year's conference include various PHP frameworks, performance, Drupal, project management, and much more.
The conference is a regional event aimed at PHP developers of all levels as well as their managers, coming together and exchanging ideas around developing PHP within teams today. Our attendees range from those living locally or making a daytrip of it right across to speakers and attendees flying in from mainland Europe. We're very grateful to all our sponsors, they've stepped up to get involved even in the difficult economic climate and without them this entirely volunteer-organised conference simply couldn't happen.
Dinsdag, 16 juni 2009
This year's php|tek conference was hosted by php|architect just outside Chicago in the US in mid-May. I attended this year as a speaker delivering a number of sessions, and was also able to attend the some of the other sessions on offer at the event. There were some particular highlights of the week.
The first session of the main conference was the opening keynote, "The Future of PHP 6" by Andrei Zmievski. The talk was great but will be forever remembered for Andrei's t-shirt which read "I ? Unicode". With the conference in full swing, we moved on to some of the more technical sessions.
Donderdag, 7 mei 2009
The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.
Dinsdag, 5 mei 2009
PHP is at an inflection point. We are at a once in a lifetime place where several factors are coming together to help boost the profile of PHP up and above the "scripting language" label and into a serious tool for enterprise development.
Many developers inside the PHP community have looked at PHP as serious development tool for years. Major companies like Digg, Expedia, Yahoo and facebook are trotted out during every discussion of PHP to prove what a useful tool PHP is. However, companies like Ladbrokes, Channel Five, Fiat, Panasonic, and the BBC, all use PHP as not only their backend glue language but for serious, enterprise level, transactional workflow systems. In a growing number of large development shops, PHP has gone from "why" to "why not".
Woensdag, 31 december 2008
Wow, what a rollercoaster ride 2008 was; in so many ways. The world faced the biggest financial crisis most of us have ever seen in our lives, the balance of power in the world shifted significantly and fuel prices both had an all time high and a 5 year low in the same year. Crazy times. And I think we haven't seen the end of it yet.
It's hard to analyse what the exact effect of all of this is on our own industry. If you look at TechCrunch's layoff tracker, it is clear that IT was not left unaffected. Several companies that are close to the PHP community have seen layoffs: SUN, current owner of MySQL, laid off about 5000 jobs; Yahoo, the biggest PHP user on the planet, laid off 1500 and even Zend was troubled by layoffs this year.
Maandag, 8 december 2008
For the second year in a row, Chris Shiflett is publishing the PHP Advent Calender. This year, with the help of Sean Coats and the design genius of Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins, the PHP Advent Calender has it's own site. (Last year's calender is still available on Chris' blog)
Among the well known PHP community members contributing this year are Chris Cornutt, Lorna Mitchell, and Matthew Weier O'Phinney. Each author participating has volunteered their time and effort to contribute a thought-provoking article to the PHP community.
Woensdag, 3 september 2008
A community around an open source project is always good. Talking to people in the community can give you support, or you can give back to the community by supporting others. But meeting the community in real life - and especially the people behind the project - gives it a whole new dimension. You can put names to faces, and make new friends. For symfony, the best moment for this is SymfonyCamp, a symfony-focused event in The Netherlands.
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Maandag, 1 september 2008
I had the privilege of speaking at this years FrOSCon (23rd - 24th August) and this being the first time I speak there and indeed the first time I venture into Germany, I was very excited about the whole thing.
Since this was also my first time at a non commercial conference (yes I've never been to fosdem and friends, very sad indeed  ) I wasn't really sure what to expect - especially if everything would run smoothly, how professional things would be and so on and so forth, this all spews from the fact that I have been involved in setting up large scale LAN parties and I've seen all sorts of breakdown and failures and was kinda expecting something similar to happen at FrOSCon; maybe I was being too pessimistic, given my old experiences of having people doing these kind of things for free.
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Dinsdag, 26 augustus 2008
A few months ago I attended the Dutch PHP TestFest. It really shoud have been called the Belgian/Dutch PHP TestFest, since about half of the people there were from the Belgian PHP user group. One of them, Felix de Vliegher, even got a PHP CVS account because of the amount and quality of his tests. All in all, the TestFest was a great succes.
Last week the Belgian PHP User group held their second meeting. Because the venue was fairly close to our office in Vlissingen, some of us decided to have a look. We were early, so there weren't many people yet, but soon the room began to fill up and in the end there were a little over 30 people. Not bad, given that this was only the second meeting.
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