Monday, January 19. 2009Dutch PHP Conference 2009 Call for Papers Amsterdam is calling, the Dutch PHP Conference 2009 Call for Papers is now open!Everyone here at Ibuildings is excited about the Dutch PHP Conference 2009. We've already started work on some of the exciting things we've got planned for this year. We want to encourage you to mark June 11-13 on your calendar and plan on attending. Continue reading "Dutch PHP Conference 2009 Call for Papers"
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Thursday, January 8. 2009Book Review: TYPO3 Extension Development
A couple of months ago I started working on a Typo3 project for a client, and at about the same time I was asked by the folks at Packt Publishing to review a book, so the choice fell naturally on "Typo3 Extension Development" by Dmitry Dulepov.
The book, published in September 2008, covers the entire extension development life cycle, from planning to uploading it to the Typo3 Extension Repository (TER). Continue reading "Book Review: TYPO3 Extension Development" Sunday, October 26. 2008Quality People
At Ibuildings we are constantly on the lookout for high quality people, who want to get involved in a variety of complex projects (and maybe some simpler ones). Although quality is hard to define, recently we have not just been looking for a long list of skills and experience, but also candidates who have the potential to play with the big boys, people who feel they can, one day, contribute at the highest level.
This has been an interesting exercise, although frustrating, sorting out the wheat from the (sometimes megalomaniac) chaff. The idea is that we are trying to 'spot' people early in their career, who have the right attitude and capacity for learning. Why am I blogging this? Well, as we are currently a growing business, we need good people NOW. But also, in the longer term, we want to be aware of the good people out there in the community, and to be on mutual radars even if it doesn't look like we need people at that very minute. It seems that on our 'PHP' projects, good Javascript skills are needed more often than not these days, and some of it is extremely complex and demanding. Are you one of those 'people with potential' out there? Speak to us, get on our radar, and one day the timing might be right for us both. Wednesday, September 10. 2008Building a PHP Center of Expertise
About this time last year, we had the pleasure of announcing the launch of our UK office. I'm very proud of the team we have built there (we have about 20 very talented people in our London office), but our growth hasn't stopped there.
This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars. Continue reading "Building a PHP Center of Expertise" Thursday, August 14. 2008Is PHP an Agile Programming Language?In raising the question about whether a specific programming language is agile I want to avoid exploring what makes a language agile, or comparing PHP with other languages. The intention here is not to associate PHP to agile as a natural relationship, as much as to try and understand if we can find the ingredients in the PHP world, for creating an agile environment. Continue reading "Is PHP an Agile Programming Language?" Monday, August 11. 2008Dutch PHP TestFest - A Big Success
In May, I helped organize the Dutch PHP TestFest in my position as board member of the Dutch PHP User Group. This dutch event, which was sponsored by Ibuildings, was part of the global PHP TestFest initiative, which aims to get a higher test coverage for the PHP language and with that stabilize the language even more - something that will benefit all users of PHP. Back in May, we already deemed our event a big success with 10 attendees, a great presentation by Sebastian Bergmann and a huge number of tests written. But it turns out to be an even bigger success...
Continue reading "Dutch PHP TestFest - A Big Success" Monday, March 31. 2008Multithreading in PHP with CURL
Most PHP developers have heard of the CURL extension for PHP or even used it. However it is mostly used in a basic form: to retrieve content from other websites or (RESTful) webservices. Ofcourse PHP itself offers several functions (like fopen or fsockopen) for getting this content, but they are all very basic. It is easy to run into limitations, for example you might want to define the request method or set another user agent (if you're building a webspider). This is where the curl extension kicks in. It is a separate library that has to be compiled with PHP in order to use it. The Curl extension has many functions and options which offer the developer more flexibility than the standard PHP functions.
Continue reading "Multithreading in PHP with CURL" Saturday, March 15. 2008ATK's hidden gems, part 2
ATK contains lots of hidden gems. Most of them are hidden because they are undocumented or because they are only documented in the API docs (which nobody seems to read...). In the past few years we've tried to improve the documentation for ATK. We've created a Wiki with lots of how-to's, the "Pizza Guides", a demo application and improved the API documentation. However there are still some features of ATK nobody seems to know about.
In this second iteration of the "ATK's hidden gems" series we will look at a largely unknown feature of ATK's record actions. Continue reading "ATK's hidden gems, part 2" Monday, March 3. 2008Unicode support in PHP 6
A few days ago I was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting. One of the talks there, was about PHP 6 and the unicode support it promised by Andrei Zmievski. I have long been waiting for unicode support in PHP because of some projects in the past where I discovered the limitations we currently have to work around. So I was coming into the talk expecting that it could now speak unicode natively.
Continue reading "Unicode support in PHP 6" Thursday, February 14. 20087 Simple PHP Best Practices
I recently read a good quote by Larry Wall (creator of Perl) saying "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.".
The truth is: writing flexible, robust, elegant and readable/debuggable code is really really really really hard, especially in a language as 'free' as PHP is. But as with all things, practice (and constant improvement) makes perfect and over the years I've picked up a lot of 'rules of thumb' that I believe make my code just a little bit 'better'. These last couple of months I've been documenting some of them and today I'd like to share some of the more interesting ones. Continue reading "7 Simple PHP Best Practices"
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