Rob Allen's DevNotes

I met Chris when he was temping for a client of mine doing data entry into an e-commerce system we were writing. Recently he contacted me to let me know that he has now started learning PHP and is starting to develop a career in web development with PHP. I was quite impressed that he had even managed to land himself some freelance work and had a client happy enough to pay him!

He asked me for some advice and I provided some information on the sorts of things he need to learn about and some ideas on where to find communities that will help.

I had recently read Cal Evans' PHP and Community post, which contains this gem:

Until all 4.6 million PHP developers are active in the community, there is always a seat at the table. If you are a PHP developer - junior level, architect level or just a weekend warrior - I urge you to get involved.

Start a blog and write about what you have learned. Trust me, if you put up something that isn’t accurate, someone will come along and correct you. That’s a win for everyone.

As a result, I also advised him to start a blog so that he can document what he now knows to the benefit of us all and also allow potential employers the opportunity to understand his skills much better than a mere CV can show.

He's taken this advice and http://jibbles.co.uk/ has been born. It turns out that Chris is a very good writer - much better than I was when I started (and probably better than I am now too)! If you are interested in watching a new coder develop into a better coder, then it may be worth keeping an eye on his blog. You could also comment periodically when he needs a pointer to something that he's probably never heard of before :)

An incident occurred at a Rails conference recently where pictures of scantily clad women were used on slides. The attitude behind the use of the images disturbs me. To be clear, this is not a Rails issue as I aware of a similar issue in the PHP community and it is prevalent in the the entire IT industry.

Martin Fowler has summed up pretty much how I feel about it:

The nub is that whatever the presenter may think, people were offended - both in the talk and those who saw the slides later. It doesn't matter whether or not you think the slides were pornographic. The question is does the presenter, and the wider community, care that women feel disturbed, uncomfortable, marginalized and a little scared.

I find it discouraging that we need to ask this question in this day and age, but I'm assured by women I know in the IT industry, that they deal with prejudice because of their sex day in day out in their working lives.

Martin goes on to say:

I have a different vision - one that sticks it to the suits so hard it will make their eyes water. How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin? How about a community that edgily pushes new boundaries without reinforcing long running evils? Perhaps even a community where women reach equal numbers? Such a community would hand the suits the defeat in the long battle women have been fighting for centuries. I'd love to be part of that.

Hear hear! That's what I want to be part of too.

I recommend that you read all of Martin Fowler's article as it provides a good grounding in a lot of the issues involved, especially if you read the other articles he links to.

I use Twitter's search feature to create RSS feeds for useful terms, like "Zend Framework". Today I noticed a tweet from ManningBooks, my publisher for Zend Framework in Action!

It turns out that they've put up a sample of the book on Scribed! Check out the book, then order it, remembering to use the coupon code scribd25...

PHPWomen are running an article contest at the moment. All you have to do is write an article for the Best Practices forum and you could win a Zend Studio for Eclipse license and a a 1-year subscription to Linux Pro magazine!

Obviously, never one to miss an opportunity to win free swag, I've entered with an article on recursion.

Now it's your turn. Write a article on a best practice when coding PHP, but don't make it too good as I want to win!

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

From Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8.

This is good news all round. It's nice to see that Microsoft have listened to the comments surrounding their original intention to make IE8 render like IE7 by default. Well done!