One of the reasons so many people choose PHP for their web development is that it's fast. Not necessarily in the gazillion-requests-per-second sense, but in terms of developer productivity. One sentence you'll hear me say regularly is: "PHP is not pretty, but it gets the thing done, and gets it done well" and even in my 'PHP in the Enterprise' evangelization, the productivity argument is one I often use.

Every once in a while things happen that prove this point, and this is a post about such proof.

2009 just ended, and since we've only just commenced work in 2010, there's still time to look back at 2009 and see what events have shaped the way we work with PHP and what happened in the general PHP ecosystem. PHPdeveloper.org has a nice overview from a community perspective. I'll cover some community aspects briefly as well, but will focus on the broader PHP ecosystem, including its adoption in the enterprise and industry participation.

This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.

Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'.

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP.

And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. There's at least twice the amount that aren't notable, and if we count all the CMS systems that many web development agencies produce, then there's a whole lot more CMS systems out there.

In an article that was recently published by Finextra, we can read that spending on social media is on the increase. While this is an interesting article and I agree with their conclusions, they do not help managers decide on what to spend on social media and how. To avoid imminent Dilbertesque "hey, I've read that we should increase our social media expenditure, make it so." scenarios, I’m providing an overview of how I think social media should be approached.

What are social media?

Perhaps a question everybody knows the answer to, but since I encounter quite a few people that have heard the term but can't name an example of social media, here's a short answer anyway: social media are internet sites and applications where the core functionality revolves around the social interactions between people. The most well-known examples are Facebook and Twitter, but there are many more applications. Often these are targeted at a particular niche, to bring together people with similar interests or to promote collaboration. Wikipedia and Last.fm are examples of social media too. Where web 1.0 was about information, web 2.0 and social media in particular is about people.

With the worst of the economic downturn behind us, we're seeing an increasing demand for our services, so we are ready to expand again. We've had a steady growth since our inception in 1999, and have always been cautious not to grow too fast in too short a timeframe, which has helped us grow steadily over the years and remain stable even when the economy turned its back on us. This means that we often say 'no' to potential customers simply because we do not want to compromise on quality and stability by growing too fast. It also means that no matter how hard we're looking for new talent, we do not compromise on our recruitment practices and we have quite a thorough process.

In this post, I'd like to share a bit on what our recruitment process looks like, what we look for in people and what working at Ibuildings means for our staff. If you're interested to work for Ibuildings, read on. We currently have openings for medium and senior developers in our UK office, medium and senior developers and a project manager for our Dutch offices and finally several medium and senior developers in our Italian office. A complete overview with full job descriptions can be found on our website.