skoop.dev

Don’t make them compete, make them work together

July 6, 2009

ezcomponents, frameworks, php, solar, symfony, zend framework

Most people know me for my strong tie with the symfony project. Granted, when I was first looking into frameworks, symfony was by far the best and most mature PHP5 MVC framework out there. And at this point in time, I still think symfony is the best solution for the types of websites and web applications I usually create. However, that does not mean that I limit myself to writing everything with symfony.

Looking for functionality
When I want to implement a certain functionality, my first stop is usually symfony itself. If symfony does not support it, I go to the symfony plugins repository. If even that does not have it, then I look around at other frameworks. Zend Framework is a first stop usually, but also ezComponents and Solar are good places to start looking, is my experience. After Googling for individual libraries, my last option is to write something myself.

The lazy developer
A good developer is a lazy developer. If someone else has already built a specific functionality, why the hell would you start from scratch? If something has been well-programmed, it will be easy to extend and overload specific features that you’ll want to use in a slightly different way. And this is exactly the reason why one should not just focus on a single framework. Of course you can always add new stuff yourself, but if there is already a good library out there that does it, why not use that instead. If you look at the current popular PHP5 frameworks (Zend Framework, symfony, Solar, ezComponents just to name a few) then you seriously cover most probably 99% of all common use cases for web applications.

Focus on the important
Instead of writing a new custom library for your project, you should be lazy and use an already existing component, even if it’s of a framework you’re not using yet in your current project. That will allow you to focus on those parts of the project that can not exist in already written components: Custom business logic, your project’s database schema and its related functionality, the views and templates of your project, the usability and accessibility of your application. These are the things that are really important for your project at any time. Re-using existing code will allow you to make deadlines more easy.

Specialization
Now, I am not saying that specializing is a bad thing. Especially for small development shops and for supportive departments of companies whose core business is not web development, it is probably best to specialize in a single framework. As you’ve done your research, you’ve probably found a framework that covers a huge part of your use cases and your developers will pick up easily and deploy quickly. Specialization is good in those situations, but don’t stick inside that box. Even though you focus on this one framework, be aware of what is out there. Every time you’re thinking “that sounds like something for which a library already exists”, make a round through at least the most common frameworks and google. See if there’s something usable out there already.

Use the right tool…
Too often have I seen companies focussing on a single tool just because “it’s the standard for our company”. You should have a wider look. You should use the right tool for the job. Everybody knows (well, should know!) this by now. It should be your mantra. So that also means that you may need to think out of the box and use a tool that is not your standard tool for specific stuff. And with that, I’ll leave you to look not just at your own favorite library but at other tools as well.
Book review: The Productive Programmer

June 18, 2009

best practices, books, efficiency, php, review, symfony

Now, the name Neal Ford wasn’t really familiar to me. Which is not surprising, as he is not at all someone from the PHP community. Ford is mostly active in Java, .NET and Ruby (as I gather from his book) as he works for ThoughtWorks (where he works with people like Martin Fowler!). This is pretty clear from the book, which does not even a single time mention PHP at all (even when talking about dynamic languages). This is not at all a problem though, since the book is pretty much language-independent. Though examples are sometimes given, the examples are usually pretty clear and easy to apply to PHP with a bit of thought.

So what is the book about? Basically, it is a programmer efficiency guide. It goes through several tools, pieces of software but also development approaches that will make your developer life easier and more efficient. There are two main parts, ‘Mechanics’ and ‘Practice’. The Mechanics part goes into such topics as accelerating your computer usage, focussing on the task at hand, automating common tasks. The Practice part goes more into approaches for development, such as Test-Driven Design, Static Analysis, some lessons from ancient philosophers that can be applied to modern software development, meta programming and much more. In this review, I want to highlight a few things I’ve picked up from the book. Be aware though that there are many more useful lessons to be learned from this book!

Windows
It has been a long while since I’ve really used Windows, and this book gives lots of examples for all operating systems. Now, I’ve been used to the commandline for instance in linux and OSX for quite some time, and was convinced that there was no serious commandline option for Windows (or any other really useful tools for power users). Though I don’t use them since I don’t use Windows at the moment, I was quite impressed by the amount of power user tools, both from Microsoft and from third parties, there are for Windows these days. This was truely an eye-opener for me.

Automation
I’ve been using several automation tasks myself for tasks that are either boring or prone to errors (this is one of the reasons why I’ve liked symfony ever since I came by it). Ford takes this even a step further. He basically advocates that for any task that can be automated, you try to write a simple script that automates that task. It is not required to have the most beautiful code, but a lot of the tasks that you do once have the chance of having to be repeated. Once you’ve written a simple script to do the task, you can actually repeat it quite easily. If it turns out that you need to do the task quite regularly, it usually pays off to refactor your script to become better/more powerful.

Philosophers
It is nice to see Ford mention some nice lessons from ancient philosophers that can still be applied to software development, such as Aristotle’s Essential and Accidental Properties and Occam’s Razor. When reading this, it definitely rings quite a few bells. These are things any serious developer has come by.

Question Authority
The chapter named ‘Question Authority’ is one of these things that makes perfect sense, but you usually don’t consider it. Basically, Ford tells us to don’t do things “just because it has always been done that way”. He tells us to think out of the box, and question the default approach if another approach makes more sense. I could easily recognize the “angry monkey” behaviour Ford was describing from projects I’ve been involved in and people I’ve met over the years.

A great book!
As with a lot of great books, there’s quite a bit of information in this book that you’d consider common sense, until you think of how you do it yourself. Apparently, even though it is common sense, we don’t really do it ourselves that often. This book is a good reminder of common sense and how it can and should be applied. Aside from that there’s discussion on quite a few tools and approaches for software development that were at least new to me and will probably be new to a lot of people in the PHP community. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the PHP community.
Dutch PHP Conference 2009: The best content around

June 16, 2009

amsterdam, conferences, Dutch PHP Conference, php, symfony

Even before the conference had started, lots of fun was to be had. Even though I missed out on it, on wednesday some of the community joined for a tour of a brewery and a BBQ. Even with all that, those who were there apparently were awake enough to make it to the tutorial day the next morning.

Day 0: Tutorial Day
Thursday was the tutorial day, a day where attendees could pick one of 4 full-day workshops. I had chosen the Zend Framework tutorial. Even though I’ve already done some Zend Framework projects, I hoped Matthew Weier O’Phinney would go into the features of the new 1.8 version, which I had had no time to look into yet. And I was not disappointed. The new Zend_Tool automation, the Zend_Application bootstrapping, and much more were all talked about. I am quite excited about these features, it looks like Zend Framework is finally starting to resemble symfony ;).

Day 1: Conference Day
The first conference day resulted in lots of talking and saying hi to friends new and old for me. This also meant I didnt really attend a lot of sessions. What I did see was awesome. After Cal Evans’ opening of the conference, Andrei Zmievski did the opening keynote, a funny and serious look at what is ahead. After that, I went into the first parallel-track, Michelangelo van Dam’s talk about SPL. Though a bit short, this session gave a really good overview of SPL and what it can do and where it can help. From the discussions afterwards between people who attended this talk, I picked up a lot of “I need to use this more often”, a proof of a good session if ever there is one…

After lunch, it was time for Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s talk on contributing. Matthew gave a good overview of ways to contribute to the community and to software projects, and I truely hope that the many attendees there have picked up something and will become more active in open source. That was the last session for me for the day, after which I started following the “hallway track” more. The hallway track continued all the way to outside, where Jeroen Stephan of Ibuildings was nice enough to get pizza for the Ibuildings employees and a few of the visitors that were left after the conference had ended. After having finished pizza, it was time for the conference social in Strand Zuid. A successful social if you ask me, with tons of people present and a good mingling between speakers and attendees.

Day 2: Conference Day
I was unfortunately too late for the keynote this morning by Owen Byrne (of former Digg fame), so my start of the day was Eli White who discussed Scalability in PHP. He talked about several different ways of optimizing applications for maximum scalability, an interesting insight in what you can do to get the most out of your application. Eli was followed for me by Juliette Reinders Folmer, who gave a session on UTF-8, busting some myths about it and unicode and then moving on to several practical tips on how to handle UTF-8. I will gladly nominate Juliette’s talk for the “Best talk of DPC” award, as it was by far the best session I’ve been to. Insightful, funny with tons of content.

After lunch it was time to sit in on Dustin Whittle, who discussed the open source platform at Yahoo! He went into why they made the choice for symfony at Yahoo! as well as went into several of the data API’s and other open source tools that Yahoo! offers. I was very impressed with the amount and variation in APIs that Yahoo! offers and will need to dig into them a bit in the near future. The timeslot after that I skipped (information overload!) only to get into the Park Foyer as the Cal & Ivo show was to start. Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch welcomed several guests on stage and discussed several topics with them, with interactivity by asking questions to the people on stage over twitter.

Overall
Looking back at the whole conference, I can say that of all conferences I’ve been to, this one was by far the best content-wise. Also, there was a much stronger community presence in this DPC than in the previous two in terms of both speakers and regular attendees. It is amazing how DPC seems to be able to keep the personal touch while growing. I am already looking forward to next year’s Dutch PHP Conference!
Dutch PHP Conference: So what to choose?

June 8, 2009

conferences, Dutch PHP Conference, php
First of all, I must say that the Dutch PHP Conference schedule is one of the best schedules I’ve seen at a PHP conference so far. At nearly any given time slot there are multiple sessions that are interesting. I also want to mention that even though I recommend these sessions, this does not mean that
- I will be attending it and
- I think the other sessions in the timeslot are crap
All I’m saying is that I personally think these are the best options and if I can find the time to make it in to the sessions, those are the sessions that I’d probably visit.

Friday June 12th

For the friday, I want to recommend:

Michelangelo van Dam – SPL, not a bridge too far
SPL is a great topic that people still need to learn about. SPL has a huge array (pun intended) of strong tools that people need to know about. And Mike is a strong communicator, highly recommended.

Boy Baukema – 8 reasons developers should love javascript
I have seen this presentation at an event of the Dutch PHP Usergroup (now phpBenelux) and it is worth seeing. Boy gives some very compelling reasons for people to (re-)consider Javascript as a language. Interesting for people who know Javascript and for people who don’t.

Matthew Weier O’phinney – Contribute!
This talk seems similar to the one my colleague Lorna and I gave at php|tek. It is about the community, and the ways you as a user of software can contribute to the community and the software you’re using. Matthew is a very good friend of mine and a great speaker, and the community is a topic very close to me. This is a must see!

Saturday June 13th

On saturday, the second conference day will take place with again a lot of excellent session. Here’s my recommendations for the saturday:

Juliette Reinders-Folmer – Everything you always wanted to know about UTF-8 (but never dared to ask)
With PHP6 in the pipeline adding full UTF-8 support to PHP, this is a topic that anyone should become more knowledgeable about. I know Juliette as a very charismatic person who will be able to interest everyone and make sure people walk away with as much knowledge as they can gain on the topic.

Dustin Whittle – Building a platform from open source at Yahoo!
I’ve met Dustin at the SymfonyCamp event before, and he’s a great guy. He does some awesome work at Yahoo! and during this session will be talking about just that. I’m quite curious to the different things he will be talking about, and I suspect most professional PHP developers will be.

And as with any other conference, the hallway track is also very important. So if you go to Dutch PHP Conference, make sure to also talk to people. Other visitors, people from Ibuildings, the sponsors and perhaps most importantly: the speakers. They’re there for the taking, make sure you grab some of their knowledge.
Also of community

June 6, 2009

community, php

During out presentation at php|tek (of which unfortunately the recordings did not work out, sorry), Lorna and I have spoken on the community. About understanding and using the community. About consuming, and about contributing. We didn’t really touch the huge difference in personalities and opinions. Every once in a while, something will clash, some problem will occur, but usually it is nothing permanent and I don’t think this problem will cause permanent trouble in the community.

With that in mind, I want to share a story of the beauty of our community. Last week, I was unfortunately informed that I had to start looking for a new job by my current employer. Now, this is always bad news, but with the current economy, this news may come harder than usual. PHP still seeming to be a growing market though, I was less troubled than someone who works in, say, construction. Still, having to look for a new job is always reason for doubts and uncertainty, because both potential new employers and you have to find out without actually working with eachother that it would be a good fit. If it doesn’t work out, the whole process starts over again. So, it is a bit hard.

So, finding a new job is usually a process of finding as many vacancies you can find, and slowly filtering out some until you are left with a small bunch (or in the perfect situation, one) that seem good fits. In these days of the Internet, just putting out a call is your best bet. So after having some private discussions with people in my direct network, I decided to put out a call on Twitter. I’d hoped for a few responses, maybe some retweets. Boy, was I unprepared for what followed!

In the first few minutes after putting out my call, I already had 10 or so retweets. After less than 2 hours, I had more than 30 retweets including some key members of the PHP community. I also got a lot of (private) inquiries, either with some interest in my services or with comforting words for the situation. My twhirl kept “plinging” on each refresh it did! That combined with the response I’ve had through e-mail, IRC and Skype made me feel so much better about the situation. It just completely cheered me up.

It seems that, through better and worse, the PHP community is there to take care of itself and it’s members. It does not care with which frameworks, CMS or forum software you work, it does not care whether you are male or female, what your sexual preference is, where you live, what the color of your skin is. And that, my friends, is the strength of this community. I would like to thank each and every one of you for allowing me to be a part of this community. I’d like to thank you all for your support, and I sincerely hope out of all of the messages I’ve received, one will lead to my perfect new job.

Now, my job search is far from done, and I’m not going to leap into anything either. I luckily have a bit of time to find a new job, so I will be weighing all the pros and cons of everything I come by, and take it step by step. I already know there are one or two there that I have my eye on that could be potential perfect jobs, but it will take some time.

Thank you, PHP community.
A fresh look

June 3, 2009

leftontheweb

Under the hood some things have changed as well. Most application code has been moved into plugins in anticipation of some other technical changes I’m planning for the future. There’s some slightly better caching here and there, and I’ve got some administrative improvements done. All in all, I am quite happy with this new release of my code. If you have any feedback, feel free to post it in the comments 🙂
The PHP standards initiative

June 1, 2009

agavi, cakephp, frameworks, pear, php, solar, standards, symfony, zend framework

The history

While being at php|tek I got invited to a meeting initiated by the PEAR people on frameworks, and more specifically naming conventions for PHP5.3. Even though I have no official role in the symfony project, I decided to accept because the purpose of the meeting seemed good and if I could somehow contribute to it, that should help the php community at large. Also, during the meeting I’ve stated several times (to make it clear) that I could not have an official say in this. However, I’ve offered some input on some issues that I think and hope have helped form the document that is now available.

The purpose

At this moment, it is sometimes very hard to combine different libraries that use different autoloading logic. The most important purpose of the meeting was to make it more clear how to handle naming and autoloading amongst different frameworks. During the work on PEAR2, the PEAR group have written up a proposal for a new standard that they thought is a good solution to this problem. While at the meeting at php|tek, several parts of this proposal have been discussed by leaders and members of different framework teams. There was an official presence of Zend Framework, Solar, Agavi, Cake and PEAR and amongst the unofficial representation were Phing and symfony. This is an impressive collection of the currently popular frameworks. And those present were there to try and get a good standard proposed for the handling of the discussed topics. And I think we succeeded in getting a good, workable standard in a first draft.

The target audience

One thing that has not been clear in the communication over the past weeks has been the target audience for the proposed standards. Even though any PHP developer is obviously welcome to adopt the proposed standards, the main target audience of the standard is the group of (official) people present during the meeting as well as any other big (or small, really) framework or library that is interested in or willing to adopt the standard. The standard should not be seen as a law, yet more as a recommendation on how to handle things most efficiently. The people that use the libraries won’t really notice much of the standards being implemented, aside from the fact that it makes their life more easy to combine several different libraries without having to juggle with autoloaders and such.

The discussion

Most of the current discussion seems not to handle around the fact that we’re trying to get a standard out there. The main discussion seems to handle around the fact that we were trying to get a moderated/closed mailinglist on lists.php.net. While I can understand the votes for more openness, I think the current situation is already open enough for the purpose. Those who represent a library or framework can apply for membership, and when approved will have a vote in the standards. The fact that the list is not open is avoid the meaningless and cluttering discussions as we sometimes see happening on the internals list. Since most people that would voice their opinion would hardly be affected by the standard, this would mean a lot of work for those inside the standards group to parse and compute all the feedback, respond to it, and/or filter the noise from the useful information. By having those that are actually affected most by the standard to be able to discuss with those less or not at all affected not able to discuss the topic, speed and quality is given preference over unclarity and fully open discussion. This is, for this specific purpose, not a bad thing if you ask me.

How to move forward

At this point, there is quite some discussion on how to move forward. I think the call from Michael J Burgess was the best so far: he basically says “let’s cut the bullshit, stop discussing purpose and form, and start moving on to form some good and useful standards”. And I have all faith in the PHP standards group to do just that, whatever way they choose. I hope to be able to contribute more in the future and will continue to support the initiative. In the end, the group is a community effort (albeit a small subset of the community) meant as a permanent improvement for the whole of the community (or well, most of it). So let’s now cut the bullshit and move on.
PHP|Tek 2009: Among the classics

May 27, 2009

conferences, php, php|tek, symfony, tek09

The trip started on monday with an early flight to Chicago via Dublin. While waiting for my flight in Amsterdam, I found out via twitter that David Coallier was on the same flight as me from Dublin, and indeed at the Dublin airport we ended up meeting eachother. We chatted for a bit, I leeched his Internet connection for a second, and then we checked in. My fresh passport posed no trouble for the US customs, though David’s Canadian passport gave him more 😉 But we ended up on the flight and flew out.

Arriving in Chicago, we took a cab to the hotel, checked in, I dropped off my luggage at the hotel and went downstairs to meet up with the people that were already there. Then and in the days after that, I’ve met so many people for the first time in real life that I’ve spoken to online already, which is strange and really great as well. After some dinner and Shoeless Joes, it was time to go to sleep. Next day would be tutorial day.

At tutorial day, I was too busy talking to people in the morning to really go to a tutorial. During the afternoon however I sat in on the excellent tutorial by Lorna Mitchell and Matthew Weier O’Phinney on Subversion. Though most of it was common practice for me, I learned some details here and there that will make my life much more useful. And even though there wasn’t a lot of new material for me, Lorna and Matthew are gifted speakers making the tutorial all the more entertaining.

The first conference day started with Marco announcing that he had kidnapped Andrei, and would do the keynote himself. Luckily, Andrei was able to escape, and ended up doing the keynote. After the keynote, I went to see Cal Evans’ talk on Zend Framework and the CLI, a talk that gave a few on Zend Framework from a completely different side than I’ve seen before. After two time slots of break for me, I went into the SPL to the Rescue talk by Elizabeth Smith only to come out being dazzled by iterators. Really though, a great talk, that hopefully will turn some people onto the right path (with the right path being SPL usage of course!). After another time slot of break, I ended the official conference day with ORM in the PHP World, a session by Maggie Nelson about ORMs. Quite interesting session, with a great overview of the ORMs out there for PHP at the moment. It turned my attention to dORM , a project that I need to take a closer look at, because what Maggie described sounds excellent.

The unconference for the first day contained only one time slot (quite enough after such a filled day), in which I attended Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s session on using Git and Subversion together. I was quite impressed by the workflow that can be used that way, and will for sure dive into this way of working.

The second conference day started with a meeting with quite a few people from the PHP frameworks world, on introducing certain advised standards for PHP libraries and frameworks. These standards should make it easier for people to include and use libraries. We had a great 2-hour discussion on namespaces and naming, exception naming and handling, and some slightly related off-topic discussions. All in all, a great meeting, which resulted in the start of a new PHP mailinglist.

After an inspiring talk with lots of HOFF in it by Eli White, it was the first time for me to stand up and do my thing. Luckily, this first time wasn’t alone, I had the pleasure to take the stage together with friend and colleague Lorna Mitchell for our talk Using and Understanding the Community. The talk went quite well and was well-received by the audience. Good enough to get appointed a slot in the next day’s unconference, so that other people could be able to attend it as well, and Cal Evans could record it for later usage. So, if you missed out on the talk, Cal Evans has recordings and will probably publish those sooner or later. Lorna and I did not really use any slides (we only had a single slide with our URLs on em) because the presentation is mostly about stories. Last session for the official conference for that day was Chris Cornutt’s presentation No Really, It’s All About You in which he compared several frameworks. It was an excellent and fair way of comparing frameworks, and if only symfony had also been in there would’ve covered all the major frameworks right now.

The unconference sessions for that day were to be missed by me, as we had a TestFest as part of the hackathon taking place after the main conference. I started out by myself but it didn’t take long for the table to fill up and we ended up working on tests with about 6 people there. The tek crew got 19 tests committed to Subversion, an excellent number given we were competing with the hackathon, unconference sessions and retro gaming night with open bar.

The last day was only a half day of official conference, but it meant 3 talks for me. I started the day at 9AM with my refactoring talk. I was expecting an empty room but instead got a nicely filled room and even a good response (meaning people were not still asleep). My presentation went well.

The Power Of Refactoring (php|tek 09)

View more Microsoft Word documents from Stefan Koopmanschap.

I then took a short break, so missed the talks in the next slot, but definitely came in again for Terry Chay’s closing keynote. The fuckcounter didn’t end as high as the last time I saw Terry speak (at last year’s Dutch PHP Conference), but the message was good and important. Most important thing I took out of the keynote was Terry’s message that this “crisis” we’re having right now should not be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity.

Even though the official conference was already done, the unconference still went ahead with another two timeslots. During the first, I was up to do my myphp-busters presentation about symfony framework. I had 6 or 7 people there who seemed to have all enjoyed the talk quite a bit.

Myphp-busters: symfony framework (php|tek 09)

View more Microsoft Word documents from Stefan Koopmanschap.

After that, I headed into the other room to do the community talk with Lorna for the second time, this time recorded by Cal Evans.

Thanks have to go out to the php|tek crew for organizing such a great conference, for the other speakers for the interesting conversations we had and the great sessions they did, and also to the visitors of the conference for their attention, questions and discussions. I also want to thank Travis Swicegood for the copy of his git book (for me to read, review and then pass on to the next interested person in line), David Coallier for the airport and conference fun, David Zuelke for the regular trips to Stackbucks, and all the other people I’ve been hanging out with during the conference, unconference and off-hours.
Speaking at Microsoft DevDays

May 26, 2009

conference, devdays, microsoft, php, phpbenelux

In the past years, many of the big companies have been moving into the PHP space. One of the last but ever since starting the movement also one of the most active is in the PHP space is Microsoft. In less than 2 years time, Microsoft has been moving from the big evil closed-source empire into a company that is seriously dedicating time, money and effort into supporting PHP as one of the most important languages for the platform. By doing this, they’ve not just enabled PHP developers to run their development environments on Windows, but are slowly becoming a more and more favorable platform for deploying PHP applications to. Now, it will be a long time (if ever!) before they become a very serious competitor for linux on the web, but especially in big enterprise organisations where Windows servers are plenty, this opens up serious possibilities for PHP.

One of the many proofs of Microsoft’s openness to the PHP language is their addition of a 4-talk PHP track to their DevDays conference, a conference which up until now was limited to Microsoft technologies. Now, PHP is one of the technologies represented their, amongst Silverlight, Azure, ASP.NET, C#, Sharepoint and many other topics.

My talk is titled 5 essential tools for the Windows PHP developer and will go into the tools that you (may) need to become a serious PHP developer using Windows. The intended audience is people who are coming into PHP (either starting out, or from other technologies) and will give a good introduction into the tools that you need for serious PHP development, ranging from stack installers to IDEs, frameworks and other tools, all with a clear focus on tools that run on Windows of course.

I am quite excited about speaking at the DevDays (or even being there for that matter). Ever since speaking/attending the 4developers conference in Poland, I’ve come to understand the power of cross-language conferences, because all different languages are usually islands of their own, yet conferences like these allow cross-pollination between the languages.

Aside from the PHP track, the phpBenelux usergroup will also have a stand at the conference, so feel free to come and say hi when you’re at DevDays!
PHP|Tek: Speaking, visiting and unconference

May 13, 2009

conference, php, php|tek, tek09
Speaking

On thursday I will be on stage for the first time. Together with colleague but most of all good friend Lorna Mitchell I will be speaking on the community: what is a community, which communties are there, how can you contribute to a community and what can you get from it. With the joint community experience of Lorna and myself, I am confident this talk will be quite informing for people not really involved in any communities yet. For those already quite into communities: You will mostly recognize yourself and your experiences in our stories I guess.

On friday morning I have been given the graveyard shift (9AM slot) to give a presentation about refactoring. Even though this talk is an introduction into refactoring, it is still not the lightest material out there so I would expect everyone to get a lot of coffee before entering the room. If you manage to stay awake, then you will learn about refactoring, and at the end you should be able to apply some refactoring to your next project and know what to consider.

Unconference

Aside from the two talks during the official part of the conference, I’ve also proposed my myphp-busters talk on symfony to the unconference. We won’t get any confirmation on who gets to speak until somewhere next week, but everyone visiting PHP|tek should quickly head over to joind.in to vote on the current proposals: The unconference is community-driven so your feedback on which topics are good is very important!

Another part of the unconference is the hack-a-thon. The hack-a-thon will allow people to get in touch with developers and others from several different open source packages, and see if they can contribute something to one of those projects. One of the things happening at the hack-a-thon is a way to contribute back to the PHP language itself! I will be co-organizing a PHP TestFest at the hack-a-thon, so you will be able to sit down and help write tests for PHP. Doing this will allow you to learn, and will also help stabilize your favorite language even more! So if you’re visiting PHP|tek, come join the TestFest at the hack-a-thon!

Visiting

This conference will be the first time I travel across the ocean to US soil. I am quite excited about it, and even though I have heard horror stories about airport security, for now I’ll assume the best in that I won’t have any trouble. I’ll be carrying elePHPants anyway, so who could do anything against someone carrying a blue fluffy elePHPant anyway? 😉

As for the conference itself, most sessions are actually must-visits, but there are some that I really want to try and see:
- Elizabeth M. Smith – SPL to the rescue
- Maggie Nelson – ORM in the PHP world
- Eli White – The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development
- Chris Cornutt – No Really, It’s All About You
I’ve given up on making full conference-schedules for myself, as I never am able to stick to it, so I’m just listing those sessions that I really want to see. Let’s hope I can at least stick to this list.

I hope to see you next week!