Rob Allen's DevNotes

As I have done in 2008, 2009 and last year, I thought I'd continue my tradition of recapping my year.

January

PHPBNL 2011 happened in January. Also, my Mac OS X application, Daily Jotter was released onto the Mac App Store.

February

The first PHPucEU happened in Manchester which was great fun and, of course, the PHPUK conference in London. The biggest news for us though, was that we moved house in February!

March

I went to Canada for the rather excellent Confoo conference and watched a snowball fight!

April

A relaxed month after 3 months of conferences and a house move. There was a Royal wedding in the UK which resulted in a lot of merchandising!

May

May was the busiest month ever. Both sons have their birthdays in May and DPC in Amsterdam and php|tek in Chicago are back to back conferences! So many good photographs this month, but I have gone with this one of Jeremy Kendall as he took many excellent photographs at tek!

June

Our trip to the zoo this year was in June when we went to Twycross Zoo.

July

We went to the beach in July.

August

In August we went to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.

September

My eldest son achieved his Grade 1 classical guitar certification this month. We also went to a friend's wedding.

October

October saw the very excellent PHPNW conference return for its forth year and I was very glad to be asked to do a ZF2 tutorial which seemed to go well.

November

November was the month that John Arnold held his creativityex project. I particularly liked my effort for negative space:

December

Last month of the year and as part of the Worcester Flickr group, I got to take a photograph in a studio!

All in all, a pretty good year. One interesting thing I did notice was that I have a lot more good photos sitting in Aperture than I published. I think this is because Aperture is so slow to use on my old Macbook Pro. I was better at publishing photos with Capture NX2 and I thought that was slow; Clearly it wasn't that bad!

Zend Framework 2, Beta 2 has been released!

The key new features are:

• Refactored Mail component
• Refactored Cache component
• MVC updates

Check out Matthew's blog post for the full details.

I've also updated my tutorial. This is a good time to get involved, try it out and let us know what you like/dislike.

With the announcement of Zend Framework beta 1, I have updated my venerable tutorial to work with it!

Getting started with Zend Framework 2 (beta1), creates the same application as my ZF1 tutorial, so it should be very familiar, but this time, it's in the context of Zend Framework 2. As usual, it's a PDF too.

Please download it, try it out and let me know if you find any typos!

If you are attending my ZF2 tutorial at the PHPNW11 conference on Friday, I thought I'd remind you that you may find it useful to bring a laptop.

Ideally, your laptop should be set up with PHP 5.3 and MySQL and a working copy of my ZF1 tutorial. It would be a good idea to have a vhost set up on http://zf2tutorial.localhost or similar. Ability to create additional vhosts may come in handy. The PHP cli tool should also work as you'll need to run some php scripts from the command line.

I'm going to be covering ZF2's autoloader, dependency injector, event manager and then we'll go through the current Mvc prototype. We'll also be doing some exercises if we have time.

I'm looking forward to it and hope you are too!

I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at the next Day Camp 4 Developers on 1st October.

Day Camp 4 Developers is a one-day online conference run by our friend Cal Evans and is now onto its 3rd outing. An online conference is one that you attend in your own home (or office!) which keeps the costs down considerably, so you have no excuse not to buy a ticket: just $40!

Day Camp 4 Developers is unusual in that it it concentrates on the "soft" skills that a developer needs in order to do their job well. The topic for this Day Camp is Project Management which is something that every developer should have knowledge about. Even if you aren't a project manager yourself, understanding what it is and why it helps is vital for your career development in any team based undertaking.

I'm talking on how we manage projects in my company. The idea is to give you an idea of the things that have to be done in order to take a proposal through to a live website as there's more to it than just writing the code. I've found that now that all of our team here understand the project management side of the job, the whole process goes much more smoothly and more profitably for everyone. Hopefully I'll be able to help you understand what your project managers are doing during their day too!