skoop.dev

Looking back at 2007 a bit

December 30, 2007

personal, year

January

In January I still worked for Dutch Open Projects, yet it became apparent that the project I was mainly working on might become it’s own company . It ended up not happening, or at least not while I was employed there, but it was something important for me back then.

February

Something that, for me, started in 200, was the symfony framework. In february, this framework reached it’s stable 1.0 version . A nice milestone for the project, even though the framework had been stable enough for quite a while already to work with it.

March

March saw a milestone for an old project of me. TomTom HOME reached the milestone of 1 million registered users . As one of the developers that was working on this project at the very start, this made me quite proud.

April

April saw the launch of the symfony-powered version 4.0 of the Jongeren in Beeld application, the application that got most of my professional attention during my time at Dutch Open Projects.

May

For me, the month of May was very much focussed on organizing the PHP Bootcamp event (June 2nd). Symfony, Zend Framework and Joomla! 1.5 framework were the focus of that event.

June

June was busy. Aside from the earlier mentioned PHP Bootcamp , it was also the month in which I did a presentation at a big conference for the first time. I also started doing consultancy next to (lead) development. And, also very important, we could finally announce that we were going to have a baby daughter .

July

July was a silent month for me. I just announced the upcoming SymfonyCamp .

August

August was loaded with work on SymfonyCamp, yet silent here on my weblog. I did post about a nice trick for symfony .

September

SymfonyCamp was the big thing for september. It was a great event, and I met a lot of cool people. I also posted about how we were approaching Agile development , and there was some attention for a bugfix in PHP 5.2.4 that was causing problems with symfony (or actually, Propel).

October

October saw the launch of two private projects. First of all, a dutch symfony advocating site: symfony-framework.nl . Second of all, the new symfony-powered Left on the Web was launched.

November

November marked another big change in my life. I left Dutch Open Projects, to start at Ibuildings.nl . Quite a big change, but so far I can say it has been a change for the better. Together with my wife, I also launched Symfony Lounge for Second Life . And also, I finally saw the css light by using YUI .

December

December was a cool month. The Symfony sprint took place , a day focussed on getting symfony further ahead. It was a huge success, even though my biggest contribution has yet to be finished 😉 And also I passed my Zend certification exam , making me a PHP5 certified developer.

Next year

For next year, I see more cool things coming up. The Dutch PHP Conference will again have some symfony touch, and together with Ibuildings.nl I definitely hope to get symfony bigger in the Netherlands. I already know that in April I will be doing a presentation on symfony for the dutch linux usergroup (NLLGG). On the private side, the daughter I mentioned earlier is yet to show her face (any time now!), so that will undoubtedly change my life. Enough to look forward to, that is for sure!
PHP is not the best thing in the world

December 23, 2007

design patterns, php, ruby on rails, symfonycamp

There are a lot of PHP developers bashing, for instance, Ruby, or Java, or any other language, really. And then there are the inter-framework wars. CakePHP advocates bashing symfony, symfony advocates bashing Zend Framework, Zend Framework advocates bashing you name it. Everyone bashing everyone, trying to “protect” their own thing.

But really, let’s learn from each other. Fabien Potencier, lead developer of symfony, told us at SymfonyCamp that Ruby on Rails is, in his opinion not a good framework, but he still looks at it and borrows some concepts he feels are good. He actually looks at a lot of different frameworks and if he finds a good concept or implementation, uses that to his (or “our”) advantage in symfony. If you like DRY, if you want to work according to Design Patterns, then this is the way you should work. Why reinvent the wheel if someone else already has made a great implementation or thought of a great way to solve a problem you’re facing? Just borrow the concept or even the implementation. You can, especially in the open source world

Let’s become eachothers friends. We all try to solve problems with software. If we face the same problem, let’s help eachother, and not tell eachother to use another language/framework/whatever.

Since Ruby on Rails if everyone’s favorite bashing target, I’d like to link you guys to this great list of things PHP developers should learn from Ruby on Rails .
Namespaces in PHP

December 16, 2007

namespaces, php

OK, let me be clear. I don’t think that namespaces will add a lot in terms of functionality, usefulness while programming itself. However, apart from being able to develop your applications using useful functions, you also need to be able to manage your code. And this is where namespaces come in.

Using namespaces, one will be able to easily group (or “package”) together related pieces of code. It will also ensure that when you’re using different pieces of different libraries you did not develop yourself, that they won’t clash anymore due to similar namings.

So, even though for day to day code typing it won’t change a lot, it will definitely change a lot for technical project and codebase management. Important enough for me and anyone else doing professional PHP development.
Zend PHP5 Certified

December 14, 2007

certification, php, zend

I was not really nervous before the exam, but for some reason during the exam the nerves played up anyway. This wasn’t really triggered by the questions though, because even though they were sometimes quite tricky and required reading over them two or three times to ensure you’ve understood things correctly, mostly it was common sense.

The road to certification was a long one. First, I wanted to get it myself. For some reason, that never happened. With my previous employer, after quite some talking, I got it arranged that they would start the process of getting developers certified, but I left before that actually got off the ground.

Ibuildings.nl, however, has the (in my humble opinion) healthy attitude that developers should be certified. So when the opportunity presented itself to get certified, I jumped right on it.

I did some preparation, mainly by reading the Zend Certification Study Guide by Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey, and testing my knowledge using PHP|Architect’s Mock Testing system. And even though most of it was common sense and basic knowledge, I was still happy I prepared. It just helps getting used to the exam structure and content.

Anyway, I passed the exam, so now I am a Zend Certified PHP5 developer. 🙂
Symfony sprint

December 11, 2007

ibuildings, php, symfony

When I first read the information on the sprint, I was a bit disappointed that it was happening on a weekday. I wanted to be part of the sprint, but it’s workday… but then I thought: what the heck, I’ll just e-mail my boss to see if I can simply spend my workday on this!

And thanks to the fact that the people at Ibuildings.nl are simply very cool people, I will be able to join the symfony team and enthousiasts on december 20 to work on symfony. What I’ll be doing I don’t know, we’ll see what comes up. But it’s great to be able to spend a whole day on contributing to symfony!
Left on the Web v4.0.3

December 5, 2007

leftontheweb

The main changes in this update is a more readable weblog post screen. I’ve added some whitespace that will hopefully make the page a lot more readable (thanks Davey). And another thing that was fixed was the comment order. There was a bug making the comments appear in a weird order.

Anyway, it’s again a bugfix release. A release with more shocking changes will follow some time in the (near/far) future.
Tip: use clearly readable variable names, and constants!

December 4, 2007

php, readable code

As an example, let’s take a look at an if-statement that I encountered in FUD forum. Note that I have very little experience with FUD forum, and even less with their code:

if ($obj->avatar_loc && $a & 8388608 && $b & 8192 && $o1 & 28 && !($c & 2))

Now, that first object attribute I can figure out, that is not a problem. But now, let’s have a look at what else is happening here. Actually, what the hell is happening here? $a, $b, $c and $o1 are absolutely not clear to me, and neither is the use of 8388608, 8192, 28 and 2.

Now, variables should never be long because that will clutter the code, but they should be clearly readable and understable, think: $user_id (or $userId depending on your preference), $file_to_update, $my_own_variable.

Same for “magic” values. I usually have an abstract class named Constants or something similar in which I “save” these magic values, so that the code becomes more clear. As an example, in my code I would use Constants::DEBUG_ENABLED or Constants::IS_ADMIN.

That makes the code so much more clear and understandable. Because if you haven’t worked on code for ages and you need to change or add something, or someone else needs to work on your code, you want that to be equally nice as writing the code in the first place. And everybody knows how annoying maintainance work is as opposed to developing a brand new project with lots of fresh code and fresh problems to solve.

And especially when you release your code as Open Source software, it’s even more important. Because you know people will be looking at it and might want to change it. It’s not just important that it works properly, but also that people will be able to easily find their way around your code. Without that, there will not be that much developers willing to join your community.

I had to learn this lesson a few years back now, and I am so happy about this. Because every once in a while I need to look at very old code I wrote, and usually it does not make things easy that I used the alphabet for my variable naming.
PHP Abstract: The PHP podcast

December 2, 2007

php, podcast

Since starting to work on a Mac, and be able to use iTunes, I finally found a good application to actually subscribe to podcasts, and since I’m deep into PHP, PHP Abstract sounded like a logical step to try. I really like it! 🙂

Funny enough though, of all the episodes, I’ve listened to so far, it’s the only not-really-technical episode that I like best so far. The Interview with Sara Golemon so far was the best. I guess I’m not really a geek after all, as I like to hear the personal experience and story more than the technologically interesting stories. No, that’s stupid, I’m geek enough, yet I still like to hear that personal story. Anyway, to everyone doing PHP, check out PHP Abstract , it’s a really nice podcast.
Using YUI grids: A dream come true

November 25, 2007

css, HTML, YUI

I know the difference between various browsers, and I know that using certain approaches in your HTML or CSS usage will probably lead to things breaking in one browser or another, but sometimes, that certain approach is just the best solution there is. I had heard of CSS “frameworks” before but since HTML and CSS has never been the thing I like doing most, I never really looked at it, afraid that I had to learn all kinds of things. I was stupid.

Just as I like symfony for the fact that it makes development more structured and easy (obviously as long as you stay within the “boundaries” of how symfony works), CSS frameworks make the CSS work a lot more structured and easy (with the same limits). There are various out there, but as I was struggling with a problem I sent an IM to Dave Dash and he suggested I look at YUI grids , the CSS grid framework of the Yahoo! UI toolset. This was a good move, because within an evening I had rebuilt the complete markup and layout of the site I was working on at that point, but the markup looked much better and it looked exactly the same in several different browsers, including the most popular, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Oh, and did I mention that it took me several evenings of work just to get it to work correctly on Firefox? 😉

The work starts with the CSS Grid Builder , a tool that Yahoo! provides for getting your basic grids up and running. This will provide you with an empty HTML page (or with lorem ipsum strings if you so choose) that you can use as the starting point for your work. From there on, it’s just decorating the HTML that is there with your own CSS for giving it the look you want. But all the rows, columns and menu bars that you want are there for you to use. Awesome! As the most work of getting a layout up and running is the positioning and general layout. After that it’s just adding borders, graphics, and of course your php code for serving the content.

I’ve now done two sites with YUI grids, and I can’t do without it anymore. This site and symfony-framework.nl are running happily on Yahoo!’s grids, and as soon as I start work on a new site, I’ll first look at YUI for solving my CSS pain.
Left on the Web v4.0.2

November 25, 2007

leftontheweb

The homepage in itself could’ve warranted a bigger version jump, but I felt it too early to bring a v4.2 and besides this “feature” was planned for 4.0 in the first place. The homepage is a better starter into what this site brings I think that having the weblog on the homepage. It also makes it easier for me to add more functionality (which I have planned already), so that there is a central point to all this functionality. I am quite happy with how it turned out, especially considering I am far from a developer.

Another notable change is the fact that the excerpts I use on the overview page are not also on the article page itself. The reason for this is twofold: First of all it gives a better flow in the “story” I try to tell (since the main articles I write usually start at the point where the excerpt stopped), and also some feed readers (for instance the Google Reader) seem to only show the title and not the excerpt (thanks Ivo for pointing me to that) so people may miss the excerpt alltogether.

Anyway, here it is, enjoy it!