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Best Practices in API Design: Audio and Slides
15 October 2010
Read moreEarlier in the year I gave a talk at PHP UK in London entitled "Best Practice for API Design". I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free …
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Return on Investment: Example
12 October 2010
Read moreI gave a talk at the weekend which talked in outline terms about Return on Investment or ROI. It was a keynote so I skated over the details, but I wanted to include a specific example to illustrate what I meant.
Imagine the scenario where, given 3 days to work …
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PHPNW10: Teach a Man to Fish
11 October 2010
Read moreLast weekend I gave a talk at PHPNW10 in Manchester, entitled "Teach a Man to Fish". This is a keynote about teams and how to use the resources around you to create a team where individuals and the whole team continues to learn and develop. The slides are not very …
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Two-Strand Crochet Ripple
06 October 2010
Read moreIf you're reading my main blog feed, this post may take you by surprise - however at one time I enjoyed crafting and blogged about it often. Recently I've been finding more time for this, helped by the inspiring news of pregnant friends, so hopefully this is the first in a resurgence of craft-related articles. There are category-specific feeds if you'd rather only read the tech and/or php content.
So, I crocheted a blanket for my friend's baby (welcome, Benjamin!)
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My Three Favourite Opera Features
05 October 2010
Read moreI'm an Opera user, and one of the reasons I am is that I can control my browser entirely from the keyboard. I think everyone uses browser keyboard shortcuts, and in a lot of ways Opera has similar functionality to other browsers, but it also has keyboard spatial navigation, meaning I can jump to the next element in whichever direction I choose. Opera also has per-site preferences, which actually make the web usable for me.
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How to Be a Good Conference Citizen
30 September 2010
Read moreI get to a lot of events and the crowds at each one are different and there's a different atmosphere - but at every event there are people who are making the whole thing less enjoyable for everyone else. Probably a lot of those people don't much care what effect their behaviour has on other people, but if you want to avoid being one of those people, these are my tips:
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Authenticating with OAuth from PHP
28 September 2010
Read moreI've been looking into OAuth recently and really like what I see, so I started looking at actually starting to play with something that uses it (and isn't twitter). In the pursuit of this, I spent some time walking through the process of how to actually authenticate using OAuth, as a client. I chose Yahoo!'s service, because they have some fabulous developer documentation and have a standard OAuth implementation. Although you don't strictly need any special libraries to handle OAuth, that would be a bit like decoding XML with a regex, so I used the OAuth Package from PECL. For others (including me after I've slept), here's an outline of the process.
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Missing pcre.h when installing pecl_oauth
27 September 2010
Read moreI was playing with pecl_oauth last week (more about that in a later post) and when I tried to install from PECL, it grabbed the files, ran the configure step but stopped with an error status during make. This is bad news for those of us who are ubuntu users …
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Celebrating 10 Years
26 September 2010
Read moreToday I'm celebrating 10 years dating the same man (since we're not married, we don't have an official anniversary but we celebrate this one). He'll be mortified when he realises I wrote about it on my blog but hey, this is important (and if you date a blogger, this is …
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Speaking at PHP London, October 2010
23 September 2010
Read moreIn October I will be speaking at the PHP London user group on Thursday 7th at the Theodore Bullfrog pub in London. I'm giving a new talk called "The Source Control Landscape", looking at the products currently available in the source control arena, how the distributed systems have changed the …
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Tips for Event Hosting: Content, Feedback and Socials
20 September 2010
Read moreThis is the final post in a short series about hosting events, based purely on my own experience and no specific expertise, in the hope that they will be useful to others doing similar things. If you are interested, you can read the first two posts, about preparing for the event and what to do on the day. This post is about some of the additional things about an event; sharing the content afterwards, getting feedback from attendees, and the most important bit - the social event.
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Day Camp For Developers
16 September 2010
Read moreI'm very excited by a new virtual event which is coming up, and at which I have been invited to speak. This is Day Camp 4 Developers, an event aimed at developers of all disciplines and focussing on the soft skills that sometimes we miss in our pursuit of technical excellence. I'll be giving my talk "Open Source Your Career", which looks at how being involved in open source outside of work can improve our professional development. The event is on November 6th, and you can buy tickets here.
There are a number of things that really appeal to me about this event: