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!

Another year is over, and as is becoming a tradition, I like to show off some photos that recap my year!

January

We started the year with a visit to the zoo!

There was also snowy weather last January and on the last day of the month, we put our house on the market. We would be accepting an offer on it in late October.

February

In February, I took pictures of canal boats.

The PHPUK conference was also in February, where I presented a session about Windows Azure and PHP.

March

I took my best picture yet of Worcester cathedral.

April

April was all about my wife! She had her first tatoo done.

and spent some time in hospital having her appendix removed

May

The big event in May was php|tek. I struggled to find a single picture that captured the conference for me, but went for this one.

June

June saw another conference: DPC in Amsterdam.

This photo of Chris Shiflett was also popular:

July

Photographically, the main source of all my photos was my aunt and uncle's 40th wedding anniversary, of which I haven't published any of the photos :)

August

I took the kids to the Severn Valley Railway in August, but the main event was our friends' wedding!

September

September saw the inaugural PHPSW meeting in Bristol.

I also tried to take a photo of a glass of red wine with a white background. This proved to be much harder than I expected

October

The Severn Valley Railway's autumn gala was held in October

October also saw the fantastic PHPNW conference come back to Manchester.

November

I tried my hand at photographing fireworks

December

The snow really fell in December. So much so that we had to abandon a trip to London having travelled 13 miles in 6 hours.

Like last year, my wrap up is mostly an excuse to show off some of the photos I took in 2009!

January

Other than the snow, The big thing that happened in January was that an article I wrote was published in php|architect.

February

We had daffodils in snow at the start of this month and then towards the end, the PHPUK conference took place.

March

Spring arrived in March. The Severn Valley Railway had its Festival of Steam gala, and I took a day off so that I could photograph it.

April

A month of punctures. I went to a Microsoft community event in London too.

May

This is birthday month in our household. It was also our first trip away camping this year.

June

What little good weather we had this year, was in June. I popped up to Manchester for a PHPNW meet. DPC 09 was also held in June and I spoke on caching.

July

We finished decorating the living room in July. We also had a week's holiday in Wales.

August

I started using a Wacom tablet in August as I was getting a pain in my wrist. August is school holiday month, so we went away for another week, to Cumbria.

September

We sold our Pathfinder in September and didn't do much else. I took the kids to visit to the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway during the month too.

October

PHP Conference season started again for me with PHPNW 09. I spoke on project management.

November

Another month, two conferences! ZendCon 09 where I gave a tutorial on the Zend Framework certification and spoke on project management. I also visited Alcatraz. IPC 09 was also held in November, where I spoke on caching and deployment.

December

The final month of the year saw me working way too hard. We did take the kids to see Santa though.

Here's to 2010!

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.

As today is Ada Lovelace Day, I get to write about a women who has inspired me and isn't my wife!

I first met Alison on the Electronic and Electrical Engineering course at University back in 1991. Of course, that dates me; Freddie Mercury was still alive and died towards the end of '91. I remember her from our Uni days as conscientious and determined to do well, though I did not know her very well.

After Uni, I joined a small telecommunications company writing C++ programs for Windows. Alison joined the company a year later in 1996 We needed a hardware engineer and I knew Alison was looking to get into communications engineering as she was designing sonar systems.She taught me about how important it is to understand the details in a project are along with the importance of good customer relationships.

I remember one project quite clearly which was to integrate GPS with a Psion Series 3 PDA. She found this project very tough, especially the C programming side, but worked very hard at it, overcoming the difficulties in both the (lack of) project spec and understanding programming a new language. She concentrated on the details and delivered what was asked of her. The team rapport we built up is something that I've been trying to replicate ever since.

Unfortunately (for me) after a year or so, Alison moved on to bigger and brighter things. She's gone from strength to strength and is now in a senior position within a major mobile phone company.