skoop.dev

2010: New things and things on repeat

January 3, 2010

apache, conferences, lighttpd, netbeans, php, symfony, zend studio

Change

My colleague Mike already posted about 2010 being a year of change for him and I feel similar in some respect. Some things have recently changed and I’m already quite happy with the changes so I’m sticking with them this year. It’s a change in toolset for some of my tools, and more might be following.

Tools

As I mentioned, I have made some changes that are here for keeps. First of all, my main browser has switched to Google Chrome. I’ve found that for 99% of my browsing needs (both development and regular browsing), Google Chrome works very nice and is really fast. There’s some bugs still, as Chrome is in beta for both operating systems I use (linux and OSX), but so far I’m really happy with it. I’m sticking to it for now.

Another tool that has changed is my IDE. I used to be a serious fan of Zend Studio. It started with Zend Studio 4 (IIRC), went through Zend Studio 5 and 5.5 and even after switching to the Eclipse platform (which took some getting used to), I stuck with the IDE. One thing I found though was that since the switch to Eclipse, the IDE was responding in a sluggish fashion. Things started to become slow. And let’s not mention the “building workspaces” problem. I worked around some issues and stuck with the others, but was not feeling happy. As the new version of Netbeans IDE came out, with support for PHP and symfony integration, I was triggered to try it out. And wow, a good choice. Netbeans has very similar features to Eclipse (sometimes with the help of plugins for Eclipse), and also has a plugin architecture for even more features, but it responds blazingly fast, even on bigger projects. I might dedicate another blogpost to Netbeans soon, but for now let’s just say that I’m really happy with having switched to this new IDE.

And more changes might be coming. After reading this article by Derick Rethans I might be checking out lighttpd soon as a replacement of Apache for webserver.

Scrum

In the past months we’ve been making big steps at work in getting Scrum implemented for our project. We’ve come great ways but there’s points up for improvement. One of the biggest points for improvement is my own understanding and overview of Scrum and the project. So I’m also going to focus on changing this by trying to focus more on keeping a good understanding of the project’s state and how we can use Scrum to be even better at implementing features the right way in the right time.

Conferences all around

The year is starting really well in terms of conferences. In the first three months of the year, I am attending and/or speaking at 4 conferences! We’re starting at the end of this month with the conference I’m helping organizing, the PHPBenelux Conference 2010. I am not speaking at that one (too much stress organizing the whole thing) but it’s going to be simply awesome!

About two weeks later I’m travelling to France, Paris to be exact. There will be the first english Symfony Live conference. The day before that conference, I’m doing a full-day tutorial on using symfony and Zend Framework together. I’m not doing this full-day training alone though, I will have a special guest. During the conference, I will speak on the symfony community. On how you can get help from it, and how you can help the community. I am really excited to be at this conference, and I’m looking forward to meeting many symfonians there.

Then two weeks later again, I’ll be in London for this year’s edition of the PHPUK conference. I am very happy to be accepted again to this conference, after speaking there last year as well. This year I’ll be doing a brand new talk there on documentation and PHP titled “Would you like docs with that?”. It will be an awesome conference, I already know that. I have many friends in the UK, and I’m seeing quite some great speakers on the schedule as well.

Then last (for now) but not least, I am really excited to be speaking at the ConFoo conference in Montreal (Canada) this year. The conference seems to be huge, and one of the cool things of this conference is that it covers more than just PHP. I’ve found last year at the 4developers conference that it is very nice to talk to people who work with languages other than PHP every once in a while, and it can help bring the communities together as well. Plus, it allows me to hopefully meet many of the north-american community again, especially since I’m not attending PHP|tek this year.

New versions all around

There’s new versions all around this year. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year, but both symfony and Zend Framework are expecting to release version 2.0 by the end of the year. I’m really looking forward to both.

And more…

Aside from this, I have some interesting things going. Of course I’m still involved in PHPBenelux, and I always have tons of hobby projects going on, but one of the most important things for me this year is the fact that I’m also the Community Manager for symfony. I have some interesting plans that I want to work on, either handed to me by members of the community (thanks!) or that just came up in my own mind. I hope to make things even better for the community than things already are.

This year will be awesome!
2009

January 2, 2010

conferences, personal, php, symfony, year

January

The year started well for our dutch usergroup with the “Frontend Special“. A great event which, looking back, was probably a practice event for our PHPBenelux Conference which we’re organizing end of this month. It was also the month where I was really excited to announce that I’d be speaking at PHP|tek as well as PHP UK Conference. And, I got convinced of “static public” instead of “public static”.

February

In February, the biggest thing was the announcement I made of symfonyUnderControl, a plugin for symfony to allow it to output XML that could be picked up by phpUnderControl. Unfortunately, I’ve not had enough time to work on the plugin recently, but since the new symfony version 1.3, lime allows the output of *Unit XML format anyway. One of the many good reasons to switch. Also, Zend launched Zend Server, a new application server for PHP which I checked out. In February, I spoke at PHP UK Conference, and really enjoyed my time in London. I am very happy to be speaking again this year.

March

March was another big month for conferences for me. I was speaking at the 4developers conference in Poland, where the hospitality completely overtook me. It was also very cool to be at a conference where it wasn’t strictly PHP. Talking to people from other languages (Ruby, .NET, Java) was very nice. Also, I went on a trip to Rome for the PHPCon Italia, which was a great experience. I also wrote about my experience about writing to improve your presentation.

April

April was a lot about the Ibuildings Techportal for me. As back then I still worked for Ibuildings, I was able to get two articles published on Techportal, the developer portal for PHP developers provided by Ibuildings. The first one to drop was Buy vs. Build which went into to choice between using existing software or components versus building something custom. The second article was about refactoring your application, a topic which has been getting more popular over the past year. It’s good to see many people writing and speaking about this topic, as it is an important but underestimated part of software development. In April I also attended the pfCongrez again, a single-day conference organized by dutch usergroup “phpFreakz”. They’re doing another one this year under the name pfcongres, and their CfP is open right now!

May

May was a crazy month for conferences and other events for me. It started with the PHP TestFest for PHPBenelux, which took place in Utrecht. It was a great success, with Pierre coming over to mentor attendees. Lots of tests were written and committed, and people seemed to enjoy the day. Then it was time for me to fly to the USA for the first time in my life, to attend and speak at PHP|tek, the conference organized in Chicago by PHP|architect. This was a mindblowing experience for me, because it was my first time meeting many of the American PHP community members. I had several talks there, but the one that most stood out for me was the one I did together with Lorna Mitchell on how to work with the PHP community. Then the month ended with me speaking at Microsoft DevDays in The Hague, a nice experience that was slightly negative thanks to my MacBook Pro’s screen breaking an hour before my talk (sure, at a Microsoft conference, why not?). I did the presentation without the slides but people seem to have liked it anyway. I got a lot of excellent questions and discussions going. The day after that I was off for Belgium to attend the PHPVikinger (un)conference. This was a great community event, with lots of interesting talks, and meeting the belgian community is always great.

June

At PHP|tek I had the great honor of being part of the first meeting of a group of people from different PHP open source projects that wanted to discuss a joint standard (at that time dubbed the “PHP Standards Initiative”) for making it easier to use different projects together. In June, I wrote about the experience. It was unfortunately also the month that I learned I had no more future at Ibuildings, but I was amazed at the community stepping up to help in finding me something new. June was of course also the month of Dutch PHP Conference, which was content-wise one of the best conferences I’ve been to in a while. And last, but not least, I need to get your focus again to my review of a fantastic book: The Productive Programmer.

July

While looking for a new job, I found out that many companies and developers still limit themselves to a single framework. I wrote about that and started with the preparations for a talk on the subject, which ended up being accepted at several conferences. I was also happy to announce I had found a new job. Even with the overwhelming response from the community, I was happy that I had finally found a new place to work at.

August

August started out awesome. After having just started my new job at Unet, I was also asked to become the new Community Manager for symfony. July was void of any events, but in August the holidays were over with two events organized by PHPBenelux.

September

September started with a great new event for the symfony community: Symfony Day Cologne. It was a great day and I am still grateful to Interlutions for organizing it and asking me to do a full-day workshop for people wanting to start working with symfony. I also announced to be speaking again at the excellent PHPNW conference, and was interviewed by DevExp.

October

In October, I attended and spoke at two conferences. First of all, PHPNW in Manchester, which was even better than last year. And the second conference was in Barcelona, a new conference for me but I’ve met quite a few very nice people there. Also, I published one of my most discussed articles ever with my “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” article, which received 13 comments so far.

November

It was a busy month in November, which led me to not publish much on my blog. I only published Telecommuting is the new black, which received even more comments than my article in the month before (20 so far). So what was I so busy with? We had a PHPBenelux meeting at the end of the month, but even more important, before that we organized Symfony BugHuntDay, where people came to help with fixing bugs in symfony. And even before that, I had a workshop at the phpFreakz Workshop Day. Great events with really cool attendees and speakers.

December

Then last month, another busy month. No events anymore but lots of work for the organization of the PHPBenelux Conference 2010, and symfony released two new versions. More than anything, I am looking forward to the PHPBenelux Conference 2010 🙂

Next Year

There is enough I already know about 2010, but I’ll keep that for a new blogpost. One thing I know is that 2010 will be an awesome year, with the scheduled release of the major new version of both symfony and Zend Framework, lots of conferences (no PHP|tek for me this year though 🙁 ) and I’m sure lots of new and exciting things will be launched.
A day filled with Symfony news

December 1, 2009

advent, book, php, symfony

Let’s start with this morning. Early this morning Fabian Lange released version 1.2.10 of symfony. This is a bugfix release in the 1.2 branch. This was supposed to be the last release in this branch, but to offer the community some time to switch to either symfony 1.3 or symfony 1.4, it was decided that the symfony team will support the 1.2 branch for another three months, until the end of february 2010.

This symfony 1.2.10 release is a bugfix release, and contains a whopping 130 bugfixes. This was also helped by the recent BugHuntDay organized by the PHPBenelux usergroup, where people could come together and fix bugs or join online in IRC to help out. Read the announcement for 1.2.10 here.

Later today, after a long night’s work, Kris Wallsmith started the release of the two new symfony branches, symfony 1.3 and symfony 1.4. Both branches are released at the same time, with a different purpose. They share the same feature set, however symfony 1.4 does not contain any of the features that were marked as deprecated in symfony 1.1 – 1.3. For people currently using symfony 1.2, the most logical upgrade path, at least for now, is to move to symfony 1.3. This release is fully backwards compatible so won’t break your project. If you are starting a new project, it is the most wise to start with symfony 1.4. This will offer you the full features of symfony without the overhead of features that have been deprecated. And as much as this is possible, it will prepare you for symfony 2.0, which will not be out until late next year. There is no guarantee though that projects with 1.4 will be portable to symfony 2. It is quite likely this won’t be possible at all (at least not by simply running an upgrade script). But for that reason, the symfony team will support the symfony 1.4 branch for 3 years. This long term support is not seen in any other PHP project that I know of in such an official way, and will ensure that companies can safely choose symfony 1.4 without being afraid of not having maintenance releases on a regular basis in the coming 3 years. Read the announcement of both releases here.

And last but definitely not least: There is another symfony advent calendar going on this year! This year is slightly different. It does not do a full project, such as Askeet and Jobeet did in previous years. Instead, a group of symfony experts have been gathered to share their expert knowledge on symfony and related topics. Topics such as routing, e-mail, forms, Doctrine, Windows, Facebook and my beloved topic community (and more!) come by in 24 parts. I am proud to announce that the chapter on the community was written by yours truely. You will have to wait until the last day though, as the topic will be closing off the advent.

If you can not wait for that or simply want to have the whole advent as a single, readably document, then you are a lucky person. All topics of the advent have been bundled in a single print book called More with symfony 1.3 & 1.4, and it available now on Amazon. After having been technical reviewer for a couple of books and having been interviewed for one, this is the first time that I’ve actually filled a full chapter in a print book where my name is even on the cover. I must say I am quite proud of that achievement. Now, to get started on that book I’ve always wanted to write 😉 If you want to read the announcement of the advent, check here. If you want to directly start with the advent, check this page.

A great start for the last month of the year!
PHPBenelux Conference 2010

November 30, 2009

conference, conferences, php, phpbenelux, phpbnl10

This is the first time we’re doing a conference of this size, but definitely not the last time. And it’s exciting already. We have already announced our first speaker: David Zuelke will be speaking about the state of SOAP in PHP. Aside from that, we have 9 other excellent speakers that will be announced in the coming days, plus two top-notch keynote speakers, also to be announced in the coming days.

Tickets are also on sale now in early bird! Registration is only 75 euro in the early bird, and you can easily pay using Paypal. There’s limited tickets available to get yours as soon as you can!

I am also quite excited to let you know we already have two excellent sponsors for the event: Microsoft and Ibuildings are helping us pull off the whole show as Gold sponsors. We are still looking for some more sponsors though, including a single premier sponsor and some silver sponsors. We also have some custom sponsor packages available. So please do contact us for more information.
Telecommuting is the next black

November 10, 2009

opinion, php, telecommuting, work

The pool of PHP developers is big. There’s a lot of them out there. Quite a few of those are junior or medior developers. These have skills to offer and are usually not as expensive as seniors and architects. However, most companies for some reason are mainly looking for seniors and architects. For “PHP rock stars”, as many companies seem to call them these days.

I’ve seen quite a few companies show interest in the available so-called rock stars on Twitter, only to step back again as soon as it becomes clear the developer is not willing to relocate. These same developers are usually very open to telecommuting, however the companies interested in hiring them require them to be local.

Well, those companies will be getting quite some disappointments I’m afraid. Many of these high profile PHPeople will not be willing to move. They either own a house (now is probably not the time to sell), have a family and social life, or just have a nice life where they live. There is no reason to move. And in the end, a job is there to support your life, life is not there just so you can have a job. If a company does not even want to have a serious talk on employment options, then why would the developer go out of his/her way for this potential employer.

Cal Evans, in his blog post Remote Developers, also talks about this and even offers companies/managers an easy checklist for requirements to successfully manage remote workers. I wish more people would look at this, because they are missing out on some great employees by not doing this. That, and I (and with me many other PHP developers) keep getting calls from recruiters and headhunters for the same job over and over again. Most of these jobs are usually quite cool, except that it gets annoying after a few calls.

I was talking over Skype to a friend from the USA. He recently talked to someone at a Drupal user group meeting he attended. This person was working for a company that was doing it all right. They had no office, all the employees worked remote. They were using Skype and e-mail for all communications, and it worked fine for them! They are the proof that indeed, this can work fine. They proof that telecommuting can work, and as more PHP developers give their personal life a higher priority than their work happiness, I suspect companies will encounter more and more people that will prefer to telecommute.

If you are a company, and you really want to have the a top crew for your PHP work, seriously look into the options for telecommuting. Use Cal’s checklist. Make sure that you’re ready for the future. Either that, or use the only other serious option: Go for those great junior and medior developers that are most probably available in your region, and train them to become the next generation of top PHP developers. It is the only serious alternative to telecommuting most probably.
Speaking at PHPBarcelona

October 25, 2009

barcelona, conference, php, symfony, zend framework

At the PHPBarcelona conference I’ll be joined by such awesome speakers as Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchell, Damien Seguy, David Zuelke, Jan Willem Eshuis, Sebastian Bergmann, Fabien Potencier and many more!

I will be doing my “Integrating symfony and Zend Framework” talk, which I recently did in Tilburg and Manchester. During this talk, I will show some examples of how to use Zend Framework in symfony projects, but also how to use symfony in Zend Framework projects.

Didn’t have any plans yet for october 30 and 31st? It is still possible to register for only 50 euro for a two-day ticket or 30 euro for a single-day ticket! I hope to see you in Barcelona!
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it

October 13, 2009

best practices, common sense, php, symfony

The issue was rather nasty, because the action that led to it was actually quite logical and made sense to the developer. I might well have done the same thing, had I encountered the code that was changed. Let me explain the issue.

Our application makes heavy use of external API’s, usually SOAP webservices, to configure systems, fetch data, etc. In this specific case, our application was calling an external webservice to push a configuration into it. The developer causing the issue found a small typo in this code: It said “Emegrency” instead of “Emergency”. Funny enough though, in earlier tests the system appeared to be working. He fixed the issue, committed it to Subversion, and went on to do his job.

Little did he know that his quick spelling fix would cause a lot of searching later on. After the sprint, we deployed to our test server, and our test users started testing the system. Quickly they found out that the configuration system would not work anymore, and let us know about this blocking issue. I started digging into the code, amongst other things by reading the diff of the sprint to find out what was changed. I found the spelling fix but quickly discarded this as the cause of the problem, since, after all, it was just a spelling fix.

It took me ages to find the problem. I faked SOAP calls, sniffed the SOAP connection to see if there was anything going wrong, checked the WSDL of the SOAP server to see if there were any obvious issues. There was nothing strange to be found! Or was there? On a closer inspection of the WSDL I noticed an inconsistency in it: The inline documentation was mentioning the element “Emergency” while the actual definition was mentioning “Emegrency”. The SOAP server was expecting the element with the typo!

Apparently, the original developer of this code had actually spotted this inconsistency (since there is hardly any documentation on this SOAP server aside from the inline docs of the WSDL) and developed to accomodate the spelling mistake. Unfortunately this was not spotted by the fixing developer. And not by me while trying to find the cause of this issue, at least not before spending a lot of time trying to find the cause of the issue.

So what to learn from this? Don’t fix things that are actually working! Even though there is a spelling mistake somewhere, be very cautious and don’t just go about fixing the mistake unless you are absolutely sure you are not breaking anything, especially when working with external APIs.
PHPNW09: Nearly perfect

October 12, 2009

conferences, frameworks, php, phpnw, symfony, talks, zend framework

I arrived on friday night and was picked up by Bittarman from the airport. He brought me to the speakers dinner where I joined for a very nice dinner. The only disturbing thing was seeing Scott drinking only water ;). After a great dinner, we moved on to “the Lass”, the location of the pre-conference social. It was very nice to meet some of my old friends there and also meeting some new people. As the bar closed, we moved on to a pub further down the street before going to sleep.

The conference started with a keynote by Kevlin Henney. I’d seen him speak at the Dutch PHP Conference a few years ago and enjoyed his talk then, but even with that in mind I was quite surprised by the talk Kevlin gave here. It was a very nice talk, filled with interesting wisdom. It was brought in a funny way that will stick with people. Most important lesson to me: Be aware of what you don’t know. Realise that you don’t know everything.

After a short break I picked Lorna’s talk on the Joel Test. I had not really read into what the Joel Test is before attending this talk, and I was actually amazed at the talk. Lorna presented the Joel Test and even added her own specific points for web development (since the original Joel Test was aimed at desktop software development). The talk was impressive and it covered many important points that any developer should be aware of. As I mentioned in my joind.in rating of the talk, I think this is the talk that should be at any PHP conference for the next year or so, to expose as many developers as possible to this information.

The next slot I skipped for some talking to people, and after an excellent lunch, I went to Rob Allen’s talk on Project Management (Getting a website our of the door). Now, for developers usually PM-related topics are quite boring but Rob was able to spice things up a bit and delivered an interesting talk, even for those with less of an inclination towards Project Management. The session after that I skipped again to prevent from having my brain overflow with information.

After the last break I decided to check out the introduction to Yii. The speaker was very brave, doing all his coding live in front of the audience, but the framework itself I wondered about. It seemed very similar to all the already popular MVC frameworks, and given Yii is still a young project I wondered whether it wouldn’t have been wiser for the Yii people to have joined an existing project instead of starting yet another framework. There were some things that I would definitely have done differently, but the story itself was brought in a clear way. After that it was my turn to present, and I was talking about integrating symfony and Zend Framework. I think my message came across quite well, judging from the response both in the room and also on joind.in. Even though I was not completely satisfied (am I ever?) it went quite well.

Integrating symfony and Zend Framework (PHPNW09)

View more presentations from Stefan Koopmanschap.

The closing session contained some interesting demo by Microsoft, though a lot of the functionality they demoed is available in other software already. And of course, many prizes were given away including two tickets to the phpBenelux Conference.

During the party afterwards, there was some nice food, enough drinks, good discussions on a variety of topics and I got to play with the Wii Motion Plus and Wii Sports Resort for the first time. Quite a lot of fun, but I decided to not stay up too long (well, it was 1AM in the end) because the next morning there was more to do.

After having breakfast with Jeremy, Priscilla, Michelangelo and a couple of other speakers, the sunday was the day for the informal sessions. I ended up only being able to attend one session (the one by Ben Scholzen on Tokens and Lexems – a surprisingly good talk for a sunday morning, I was able to follow it quite well even with the early hour) after which I hung out in the hallway and talked to some people before being brought back to the airport together with Juliette Reinders Folmer and David Zuelke to catch our flights back.

I had a great time at PHPNW and I am looking forward to being there again next year!
phpBenelux september meeting

October 1, 2009

php, phpbenelux, symfony, talks, zend framework

Since I start early at work I usually can leave early which I liked in this case because that would allow me to meet Michelangelo for some short dinner in Tilburg before the meeting started. Traffic hated me though, so I was quite late and had to cancel our dinner plans. It was a shame, but not a real problem. The real problem came when Juliette, our first speaker for the night, called that she was also late, and asked if I could take first spot. I rushed for a quick Subway sandwich and was in time for the meeting after all 🙂

The meeting was opened by our location and booze-sponsor Freshheads (who, if you did not know yet, are looking for developers!). After the opening, which included a very funny promotional video for Freshheads, it was my turn to welcome everyone and then do my talk. I was a bit nervous, especially since this was the first time I was doing this talk. There are still some things I was not happy about, but feedback was very good and I got some excellent questions, so I am happy about it. These were the slides I used for this talk:

Slides following later. Slideshare is currently down for maintenance

If you didn’t attend this meeting, there’s more chances to catch this talk: At this point, I’m already confirmed to be giving this talk at the PHPNW09 conference and at phpBarcelona. Come catch my talk there if you can!

After I finished, we had a short break after which we could welcome Juliette for the second talk of the meeting. Well, talk, it was actually a quiz. A quiz on PHP equations. For a lot of “us php experts” it meant a good pointer on how many details of PHP we are not familiar with. A very interesting quiz for sure, which tought me a lot!

After the talks ended and we gave away some more elePHPants, it was time to head to the pub. Again, Freshheads picked up the booze tab (Freshheads ROCK) and we had some nice discussions before heading home. All in all, an excellent meeting, and I am already looking forward to the next one!
Interviewed by DevExp.eu

September 23, 2009

meta, personal, php, symfony

The questions range from projects to how I got to where I am today. So do check out the interview. It seems the guys of DevExp are working on getting more interviews up on their site in the coming period, so add their feed to your reader 🙂