Pragmatism in the real world
I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at TEK X in May, in Chicago. This is one of the big US PHP conferences and I feel privileged to be invited. I'll be concentrating on Zend Framework with a tutorial called "Building a Zend Framework application" and a talk on "Working with Zend_Form". After a couple of less technical talks recently, it'll be fun to dive into more technical content. Hopefully, I'll be… continue reading.
I've recently been looking at different version control systems, specifically distributed ones like git, Bazaar and Mercurial. At IPC I was talking to Travis Swicegood about wanting to learn and he very kindly organised a copy of his book for me to review and learn from. I didn't know much about git at all before reading the book. I do now :) It turns out that git is fairly easy when you have a good… continue reading.
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… continue reading.
This year I was asked to write an article for PHP Advent 2009 an it's now been published! Automate your Deployment is a look at how to automate the process of deploying your application to the web server. At my company we started automating our deployment systems just over a year and the number of issues we have around deployment of new code to a website has dropped considerably and is no longer a stressful… continue reading.
Zend_Application will read the data in your application.ini and make it available from your bootstrap's getOptions() method. It then sets the bootstrap as a parameter in the front controller. Note that the top level keys are all normalised to lowercase too. You can then retrieve the options in a number of ways. In the controller you can do this: public function someAction() { $bootstrap = $this->getInvokeArg('bootstrap'); $options = $bootstrap->getOptions(); } Outside of the controller you… continue reading.
The International PHP Conference 2009 took place last week in Karlsrule, Germany. This conference has presentations in both English and German, though fortunately, there was always at least one English session in each time slot! I managed to get to a fair few sessions. Cal Evans' talk on Zend Framework command line applications was an especial highlight as it's an area that we could do better and I now know how to! Similarly, we recently… continue reading.
I've written before about URL rewriting with IIS7's URL Rewrite module. IIS6, which ships with Windows Server 2003 does not have this module though and guess which version my client's IT dept run? As usual, they wouldn't install ISAPI_Rewrite or one of the other solutions for me. In the past, I've simply written a new router that creates URLs with normal GET variables, but this is ugly and I wanted better. One thing IIS6 does… continue reading.
I know I'm late on this one, and I only have the pathetic excuse of being busy. However, ZendCon 2009 was a great conference and I want to thank Eli, Zend and S&S for putting it on. I gave two talks; a Zend Framework Certification refresher tutorial and a talk on project management. Overall I was happy with how both talks went. I think that my presentation style has improved considerably over the last year… continue reading.
The PHPNW 09 Conference took place last Saturday and I've finally found time to write up my thoughts on it. I went up on Friday in order to meet up with the speakers for dinner and also to go to the pre-conference social at the Lass O'Gowrie. The conference was kicked off with an excellent keynote by Kevlin Henney on uncertainty. The main point I took away was that the attitude of "any decision is… continue reading.
At conferences, I really like to meet people that I know online, but haven't met in person before. The big problem for me is that I have trouble connecting the dots, so if we end up talking, please mention where I might know you from. For example: "Hi, I'm Sue. You might know me as fiddlesticks on the zftalk channel on freenode" and I'll be able to place you correctly and may even remember you… continue reading.
