skoop.dev

A call for agile developers

March 22, 2007

agile, php

Ever since first being introduced to the Agile methodologies while working at TomTom, I’ve been intrigued. We worked in an agile way at TomTom, and now that I’m Lead Developer at Dutch Open Projects, I’m starting the introduction of Agile development there.

My experiences so far as a PHP developer is that a lot of companies and (open source) projects do not work according to Agile methodologies, or often not really according to any methodology (a.k.a. Cowboy Coding). While there may be nothing wrong with that, I still want to try to push the Agile methodologies more into the realm of PHP.

For that, I’ve registered a new domain name, AgilePHP.eu. As I am far from a true expert on Agile Development, I don’t want to do this on my own. So for that, I’m looking for some (european?) PHP developers who want to start a nice project with me. These PHP developers should either have experience or a strong interest in the Agile methodologies.

These developers will be working with me on thinking out the best form for the website, and also of course to get it up and running. It’s all on a non-profit basis, the reward will be that you’ve worked on getting a wonderful site in this world and teaching the PHP community about Agile Development 😉

If you’re interested, please send me an e-mail over at stefan@agilephp.eu, and we’ll go from there.
Programmer’s pride

March 14, 2007

tomtom, work

Here’s some Programmer’s Pride for you. As of today, I have been one of the main developers of a system that is used by more than 1 million users worldwide. Now, that is what I call cool.

TomTom HOME is a desktop application that talks with the TomTom servers to fetch updates and information (using XML), and allows you to purchase new content and directly install it. One of my main tasks at TomTom was building the XML server, from scratch.

Not long after the launch, it already became clear that the system would be popular. The userbase grew enormously fast, at times too fast. There were some server problems, which has been solved quite some time ago already and now everything is running wonderfully fine. 1 million users is a milestone though that I can not just let pass. It is amazing to be able to say you have developed a system that is used by this many people, around the globe.

So yeah, I’m quite proud about this, still. Even though I’m not with TomTom anymore, it’s still a wonderful thing to see the system hit this milestone.
Beta time

March 8, 2007

personal, php, symfony, work

It’s been a while since my last post, at least for my usual posting frequency. I’ve not been idling however, I’ve actually been quite busy.

First of all, I did something stupid, and lost all the data on my laptop. It sucks, and I felt very bad about it at first. I’ve lost quite a big deal of (personal) e-mail and (private) code by it, but luckily, little of my work-stuff got lost. All my work code goes into Subversion once it’s slightly stable, so that means only some development code got lost. These days, I look at it as a fresh start.

The losing of some data, especially some code I’d written for various hobby projects, actually turned out into something nice. I decided to bundle the efforts for several of my planned projects into one big project. Hopefully, that will mean that when I’ve finished the base code of this project, I’ll be able to launch three new community websites I was planning on working on. After that, I just need to extend those sites with the specific functionality I’m planning for those sites. And this time, it’s all going into Subversion! 😉

Then, and probably the most important thing going on at the moment for me, is the preparing of the first beta release of Jongeren in Beeld v4.0. We’ve been working very hard on this for the past few months, and we’re now nearing the first beta, which is due tomorrow. Version 4.0 will be a complete rewrite of the application, ditching Mambo in favor of Symfony. We’re moving from a “specialized CMS” to an actual Webbased application with this. I’m very happy about the result so far. It’s only a first beta, but it’s quite something to have accomplished in only a few months time, with all kinds of other projects also coming in between.
Symfony framework reaches 1.0 stable!

February 20, 2007

frameworks, php, symfony

They did it! Symfony framework has has released their stable version 1.0. A nice milestone, congrats to Francois and Fabien!

I’ve been very impressed with the framework from the moment I first checked it out, somewhere in october or november last year, and I’ve been working on developing several applications in Symfony since then. If you’re looking for a framework for building your PHP application, then I’d highly suggest you check out Symfony
Do no harm?

February 18, 2007

google, technology

I have always been a big Google fanboy. And as far as I’ve always known, Google had a simple policy: Do No Harm. However, it seems that they now are intending to actually Do Some Harm.

Google is sueing a polish poet group who own the domain gmail.pl. Now, if these poets were actually using the domain to offer a similar webmail service, I’d consider Google’s action justified. But since they are not, but instead just publish their poetry on the website, and ‘gmail’ is the acronym of the full name of the poet group, I start wondering about the reasons behind the lawsuit. This seems to be purely out of business reasons of wanting to own the gmail.* domain names. Since this poetry group was simply earlier in registering the domain, I think Google should just accept the loss and move on.

Shame. I really still feel Google is great, but I really dislike this step.
Trouble in paradise

February 17, 2007

frameworks, opensource, php

In the period of a few hours yesterday, three new PHP frameworks were announced on Planet PHP and PHPDeveloper. It was really something I noticed, that this happened in such a short timespan. I was clearly not the only one who noticed. Andrei and Clay also noticed and wrote about it in pretty clear words. And as Andrei and Clay noticed, this is not necessarily a good thing. This might even be seen as a Bad Thing.

While I never have any problems with developers starting their own framework, I truely believe that it is, in most cases, not a necessary step. Instead of starting your own framework, you could also start working with an existing framework and simply extend the functionality: That is the purpose of a framework. You could even contribute the extensions to the framework, thus ensuring the further development of the framework you’re using.

Frank from Stubbles decided to “fight back”. Even though I agree mostly with Andrei and Clay, Frank has a very good point. One I’ve been trying to make earlier as well. Of course, my humble opinion is not probable to be picked up, but with the attention that this “war” is getting, it would be nice if Zend or another leading organization would actually pick up on this. PHP needs specifications for standard functionality. Without it, there will be little unity in the world of PHP. With it, frameworks will be even more usable, and everyone will have an easier time developing.
The definitive guide to Symfony

February 14, 2007

books, php, symfony

Yay, it’s in!
The user will always be the weak link

February 11, 2007

security, weblogging

I’m an occasional user of the coComment system. That is, I have an account, I mark most of the comments I leave to be tracked by coComment, yet I rarely actually check. I should do more often of course 😉

Usually, I keep good track of which textarea fields I mark to be tracked by coComment. Yet, I seem to slip occasionally. I noticed I did this once, while filling out my Last.fm profile. I am clearly not the only one. Since I slipped, 120 other people have also done the same.

And as I was thinking about this, I was immediately seeing the potential for a security or privacy problem here. In this case, the last.fm profiles are public anyway, so no problems will arise in this situation. But consider the huge amount of web applications out there where you have to sign in to use the application. If I would accidentally mark some private note on such an application to be tracked by coComment, and others have done the same thing before me, then that would open up the information I entered to the world.

Obviously, this is no security hole you can fix. It’s a mindset that users need to get used to. But even me, an experienced web user that has an eye on security, even I slip every once in a while it seems. Security is a tricky thing, and the user will always be the weak link.
Zend Certification for all!

February 2, 2007

certification, php, zend

One of the things I’ve been trying to accomplish while working for Dutch Open Projects is to get all our developers Zend Certified. Today, we put the first real step on the road to this goal for the first three developers by getting the nicely priced bundle for three of our developers: Two juniors and one senior will be our test bunnies 😉

I feel that the certification is a win-win situation: As a company you gain by being able to show your clients that your developers have the skills they need to perform their tasks. Also, the developers will undoubtedly learn from their exam preparations.

As a developer, you also gain. You gain knowledge and experience, you gain the ‘Zend Certified’ title, which is of course also fun, and you have something nice to put on your resume for the future.

I am happy that the movement has been started. The eventual goal is to have all developers certified. With a bit of luck, by the end of the year, we’ll have all that done. For now, we want to await the experiences of our first three developers.
trac-post-commit-hook on DreamHost

January 22, 2007

dreamhost, issue tracking, trac
Now that I have Trac working on DreamHost, I want to also get the trac-post-commit-hook working, so that commits will automatically show up in Trac. Using the default instructions unfortunately does not work fully, since the installation by DreamTracInstall which I wrote about earlier does some specific things (like installing a completely new Python environment) that the default instructions don’t take into consideration. It’s not that hard though, as the basic steps are the same.

First of all, you’ll need the script. Since DreamTracInstall currently installed 0.9.6, you need to use that version. You put this script in some location on the server. I put mine in /home/skoop/trac_sites/trac_hooks (I know, maybe not the best location, but it keeps my home dir clean).

Now, using an SSH connection, go to your subversion environment for which you want to install the hook (/home/myusername/svn/myproject/hooks). Copy the post-commit template (post-commit.tmpl) to ‘post-commit’ (no quotes). Your post-commit script will now be found. Comment out the e-mail alert (unless you want to use it, in that case chance the e-mailaddress). Now, add the following:
```
LOG=`/usr/bin/svnlook log -r $REV $REPOS`
AUTHOR=`/usr/bin/svnlook author -r $REV $REPOS`
TRAC_ENV='/home/myusername/trac_sites/myproject/'
HOME='/home/myusername' 
export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/packages/lib/python2.3/site-packages"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/packages/lib" 
export PATH="$HOME/packages/bin:$PATH"

/home/myusername/packages/bin/python2.3 /home/myusername/trac_sites/trac_hooks/trac-post-commit-hook \
 -p "$TRAC_ENV"  \
 -r "$REV"       \
 -u "$AUTHOR"    \
 -m "$LOG"
```
Ensure to edit the paths to your specific situation.

Now, you need to one last thing. You need to ensure that your trac database directory and file are writable by the webserver user. I am sure we’re opening up a can of security worms here, but it seems there’s no easy way around it, except if you want to somehow start writing proxy scripts which are executed as another user. So go to /home/myusername/trac_sites/myproject/ and chmod -R 777 db

Now you should be all set. Commit something to your repository, with in the commit message something like re #1 (this has to be an existing issue number of course) … in the Trac web interface, you should now see the commit message with a reference to the changeset listed with the issue you mentioned.

Enjoy!