Pragmatism in the real world
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… continue reading.
Bradley Holt has posted an interesting article on why rapid release cycles are a good idea for Zend Framework major versions. For a framework (and maybe for other software), I think the following rules are necessary in order for a rapid release cycle to work: Minimize backwards compatibility changes between major releases. Targeted and strategic refactoring, rather than major overhauls, are preferable if you are releasing often. Small backwards compatibility changes makes migrating from one… continue reading.
With OS X 10.7, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.7. /usr/local Ensure that the following directories exist: sudo mkdir /usr/local/include sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1 MySQL Download the 64bit DMG version of MySQL 5.1.x (or 5.5.x) for OS X 10.6 from mysql.com and install the pkg, the startup… continue reading.
A few months ago, Robert Basic wrote about this handy organisational tip: Thanks to a discussion on the Zend Framework mailing list I learned about a new feature, a feature that allows for grouping action controllers in subdirectories! He then goes on to explain how he can now group controllers related to admin within a subdirectory of controllers which makes organisation easier: Best part is that this feature requires no additional configuration. Create a subdirectory… continue reading.
One thing that is different between Zend_Config_Xml and Zend_Config_Ini is that with Zend_Config_Xml you can pass in an XML string as the first parameter of the constructor and it will work. This doesn't work with Zend_Config_Ini as we use parse_ini_file() under the hood. With PHP 5.3 however there is is a new function called parse_ini_string() which will allow us to load arbitrary ini string into Zend_Config objects. This can't go into Zend Framework 1 though… continue reading.
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 It wouldn't be a trip to Chicago without pizza! I loved Liz's hat Lig had a two-hands-one-mouth problem… The social events at tek are great. You can usually find Liz enjoying the party! It was always fun to see groups showing off some cool… continue reading.
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! Harrie was an excellent DPC host. Aral gave an excellent keynote and was around for the conference. He had us in stitches when trying to tweet from an Android phone! On the hallway track,… continue reading.
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… continue reading.
One area of displaying lists on web pages that I've generally disliked doing is pagination as it's a bit of a faff. Recently, I needed to do just this though as I couldn't delegate it as my colleague was too busy on other work. As a result, I thought that I should look into Zend_Paginator this time. Turns out that it's really easy to use and the documentation is great too. The really useful thing… continue reading.
Update: This position has now been filled. So… we seem to be in the same position as everyone else and are looking to hire a new, great, PHP developer! From the spec: Big Room Internet are looking for a great PHP software engineer to bring depth to the team and spearhead our future development. You will be working across a range of projects, ideally with experience in seeing through a project from start to finish.… continue reading.
