Bring a laptop to my ZF2 tutorial at PHPNW11

5th October 2011

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!

Day Camp 4 Developers #3: Project Management

31st August 2011

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!

tek11 photos

16th June 2011

Following on from the previous post, these are some of my favourites from php|tek 11.

On the day before tek started, playing mini-golf with Helgi, Ian, Kathy, Rafael & Lorna was fun

Professional at work...

It wouldn't be a trip to Chicago without pizza!

Pizza!

I loved Liz's hat

Liz and her hat

Lig had a two-hands-one-mouth problem...

Red or White?!

The social events at tek are great. You can usually find Liz enjoying the party!

Centre of attention

It was always fun to see groups showing off some cool tech or another to each other. In this case, I think Lorna and Matthew were discussing using LaTeX for presentations

Matthew and Lorna

Jeremy took great pictures too and also posed on the couch

Here's looking at you!

I think the funniest moment of tek11 was when Ian read us excerpts from Page & Didday's Fortran 77 for Humans he found on the shelf at Potbelly's. Lunch will never be the same again.

Ian reads us exercepts from the Fortran book

Looking at this set of photos, you'd think that all we did was party. In fact, I also went to a number of amazing sessions where I learnt stuff, but I was so busy paying attention, I didn't take any photos during those times. I had a great time at both DPC and php|tek this year and if you haven't been to a PHP conference, then I recommend that you go to the next one you can!

The full set of photos is up on Flickr.

DPC 11 photos

13th June 2011

A few weeks ago, I managed to visit two conferences back to back: DPC and php|tek. I managed to take some photos and these are some of my favourites from DPC.

I finally managed to snag a good picture of Juozas!

Juozas Kaziukenas

Harrie was an excellent DPC host.

Harrie

Aral gave an excellent keynote and was around for the conference. He had us in stitches when trying to tweet from an Android phone!

Aral Balkan

On the hallway track, David wasn't shy about sharing his opinions on web services!

David and Lorna discussing Restful APIs

It was great catching up with Lig, who wore the best t-shirts!

Lig *is* the IT guy!

Finally, the best photos I took at DPC were both of Cal:

Cal, relaxing

Cal

The full set of photos is up on Flickr.

ZF2 Training at PHPNW 2011!

10th June 2011

The fabulous PHPNW conference is back again this year on October 8th and 9th and tickets are now for sale for a mere £72. Buy now! as you only have a few days left at that price. There's no need to wait for the schedule as we know from the past 3 years, that it's going to be a great selection of relevant topics.

More importantly, this year there's a tutorial day on Friday 7th October which is also very cost-effective at £330 for the tutorial day and the conference.

There's a great set of tutorials:

  • Rob Allen on Zend Framework 2 (that's me!)
  • Marcus Deglos on Drupal performance and tools
  • Arne Blankerts on Security
  • Lorna Mitchell on Web services
  • Stuart Herbert on Maintainable applications in PHP using components

Obviously, I'm slightly biased, but I think that the Zend Framework 2 tutorial day will be great! ZF2 is so new, I'm not sure exactly what we'll be covering. My plan at the moment is to cover a few key topics in depth, so that you really understand them and be confident that you can develop new ZF2 applications going forward.

Head on over to the tutorial day page and buy a ticket now :)

If you're planning on attending the tutorial, I'm interested in what you'd like to see covered; let me know.