11 Feb
2011

Ticket Giveaway: DC4D:2

Did you know that there’s a second edition of the DayCamp 4 Developers event coming up in March? The daycamps are a chance for developers to invest a day in their careers, wherever they are, focussing on the soft skills we need to grow beyond coding monkeys and into accomplished and upwardly-mobile professionals. It’s a virtual conference, so you can join us from anywhere in the world!

In the new edition of DC4D, I’m giving a session entitled “Could You Telecommute?”. I have worked from home for three years and if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that it isn’t always easy! Telecommuting doesn’t suit everyone so if you think you’d like to work this way one day, then I hope to give some pointers for how to tell if it will work out, or how to make it work for you. The event is on March 5th but there are also video-only tickets for those people who would rather watch their sessions back at their own pace.

I have a ticket to give away, so if you want to be my guest, leave me a comment and tell me why I should choose you! NB the tickets are only $35 so this isn’t quite as impressive as it might sound, sorry!

I’ll pick winners on 26th February, with a week to go to the event.

09 Feb
2011

Book Review: The Passionate Programmer


I’ve been putting off writing this post, because I wasn’t sure I could do the book justice, but I read and really enjoyed “The Passionate Programmer” last summer, and I’ve been dipping into it again and again ever since. The book was actually a recommendation from Travis Swicegood, after he saw me give my talk Open Source Your Career. It seems like it’s not a well-known title so I thought I’d share my thoughts on the book and what I got from it.
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07 Feb
2011

Installing Gearman for PHP and Ubuntu

I’ve been using Gearman lately in a project that I’m working on, and of course a month later when I came to deploy the code, I had to look up all over again what was required for a gearman server in order to put it on the new platform. Here is the short version for my future reference (and yours, if you like)

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04 Feb
2011

Why I Love Unconferences

I’m seeing increasing numbers of unconferences popping up and I must say I’m quite enjoying them. Last year I went to OggCamp, we included an unconference at DPC, and now there’s a PHP-specific event coming up in Manchester: PHP Unconference Europe or phpuceu. I really like unconferences but I think sometimes people don’t know what to expect, so here’s an outline.

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03 Feb
2011

Using gnome-keybinding-properties

ubuntu netbook logoLast week I reinstalled my aspireone, which I’ve had for quite a while but which is really excellent for events. I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it and it installed like a dream, with peripherals and powersaving all working correctly. It says something about the positive experiences I’ve had with *buntu installs lately that I even did this over the wifi!

The weird thing was that I don’t really use Gnome on other machines as I prefer KDE, and I hadn’t seen the Unity desktop before (as I understand it, this is a lightweight gnome replacement – it still looks and smells like gnome to me), so there were a few things that were “missing” as far as I was concerned. Easily the most annoying is the Alt+F2 shortcut, I don’t really care what GUI I’m using, I mostly just run things from that! I also realised that I now had workspaces, but that there was no keyboard shortcut to switch between them (I don’t use a mouse, so it’s keyboard or nothing for me).

Enter a wonderful utility called gnome-keybinding-properties.
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02 Feb
2011

27 Ways To Be A Better PHP Developer

Last weekend I was at the PHPBenelux 2011 conference in Antwerp. As conferences go it was pretty awesome, completely surpassing my expectations in many ways! The schedule was published in advance but I somehow forgot how many friends I have in that part of the world and what a wonderful crowd there is at this event. My hearty congratulations to all the organisers and my thanks to everyone who attended – they used joind.in for the feedback and there are plenty of comments on there too, which I now consider a metric of how engaged a community is!

I was at the conference to give a keynote with ex-colleague and good friend Ivo Jansch. We gave our new talk “27 Ways To Be a Better Developer” in the opening keynote slot, which was a lot of fun (even if I did freak out slightly and hide in the middle). Ivo and I have lots of experience of working with developers, recruiting, running teams, and we had a great time working out *which* 27 items to include and how to tell the story. It was a little bit hectic since we had about 50 minutes to give the talk but we had some generous reviews and so many people have come and told me about one or two points that have made a big impact on them. These are the slides:

27 Ways To Be A Better Developer

Thanks again to all who made this event what it was – organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees!

27 Jan
2011

Number System Primer

I regularly teach the Zend Certification course and one thing that really splits those with a Computer Science background from those without is handling number systems other than decimal. Personally I don’t see it as a major omission, I certainly don’t work with those systems very often in web development! However, ZCE includes decimal, binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers in its syllabus, so I always make sure to stop and teach it. Here’s a quick round-up of how they work:

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26 Jan
2011

Using s3cmd To Manage Files on Amazon S3

Recently I moved some podcasts on to Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, which I know is great and easy to use, and I’ve used it with some wrappers, but never directly until now. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that S3 is great and easy to use :) I used s3cmd from s3tools – a collection of python scripts that made this really really easy. Even better, I’m an Ubuntu user so s3cmd is already packaged for me and I simply installed with:

sudo aptitude install s3cmd

Once installed, I found s3cmd --help was surprisingly helpful. To start with you need to set up an access key on AWS (Amazon Web Services) using your amazon user credentials, then supply this to s3cmd by using s3cmd --configure and following the prompts.

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24 Jan
2011

Blanket for Reuben

Some very good friends of ours recently had their first child, a son named Reuben, and this is the blanket I made for him:

DSCF4224.JPG

It’s a very traditional granny square crochet blanket, I love these because I can take a ball of wool and a hook with me to anywhere and just make another square or two when nothing else is happening, but I never have to carry around the full project until I’m assembling it right at the end. The border is one round of trebles and another of double crochet – as simple as anything!