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Three Months In: The (Ad)Venture Continues
21 October 2010
Read moreIt's three months since I gave up the day job and so many people have asked me how it's going, that I thought I'd give a quick round up!
I am a statistics nut so it will surprise nobody that I track my time religiously (using harvest, which I'll post about some day soon). From this I can tell you that I spend about 40% of my time working for other people, and the rest doing things like writing, preparing talks, accounts, meetings, or whatever. I've also taken 14 days off, which has been absolutely fabulous after a decidedly work-heavy first half of 2010. The biggest change is that I've only worked one weekend day. One.
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Is Enum Evil?
20 October 2010
Read moreWhen I work on database designs, either on my own projects or as advisor to others, I often find people very reluctant to use an enum type for any columns. Now, I'm not about to advocate the gratuitous use of an enum column, they definitely have some pitfalls, but I think it is important to understand these rather than just shouting "enum evil!" if anyone should mention them.
There are cases where an enum is the correct choice for a particular type of data, so let's look at what an enum type actually is and does.
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My Talk Filing System
19 October 2010
Read moreThree years ago, I had never spoken in public (I have video of that first attempt and all I can say is that I've come a long, long way!). Since then, I've done rather a lot of it. I've submitted countless conference talks, had the minority of those accepted, and prepared and delivered those that were. Not many talks have been given twice, but some have, and now some are getting rebranded since I am working for myself and can choose my own slide branding these days. All this adds up to a lot of content to keep track of!
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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 …