16th August 2009
Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)
Three years later and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for Zend Framework as you can tell since the latest version of the tutorial supports ZF 1.8 and 1.9 and uses the new features like Zend_Application and the command line Zend_Tool scripts. And I wrote a Zend Framework book!
I wonder what will happen in the next three years?!
3rd August 2009
Just a heads up, I am currently transferring the registrar for akrabat.com, so there may be an interruption of service here if I mess up :)
1st May 2009
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.
24th March 2009
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.
19th January 2009
Since the New Year, I've been very busy and have had little time for coding. One reason is that I decided to take a photo every single day of this year. It's proving fascinating, but is taking up more time per evening than I realised. Of course, as I get into the swing of things, the time taken choosing which image(s) to post and then processing them will go down :) If you are interested, I'm posting the pictures to my Flickr account.
At work, I'm transmogrifying into a full-on Project Manager and only bug fixing code here and there. We have a good PHP developer at work and I'm gradually getting comfortable with him doing the design of stuff that would have been my domain six months ago. Letting go is hard.
I should probably talk about what my experiences as a Project Manager in a small non-enterprise web shop. Maybe I'll turn it into a talk for the Dutch PHP Conference who have recently opened their Call for Papers. Of course, from Cal's blog article about it, I should also come up with an advanced PHP topic. That may not be too hard as I have an idea for a personal project that may have something interesting to discuss inside it.
Here's today's photo, which proves that I have a long way to go before I can call myself a still-life photographer.
I quite like it though!
