Yearly Archives: 2012

30 Oct
2012

PHP at FOSDEM: Call for Papers

There’s an excellent open source conference that happens every year in Brussels in February, called FOSDEM. It consists of some main tracks, plus a series of sub-rooms, where various technical communities are given some space to use for whichever talks they choose; the schedules are centralised so that people can pop in and visit any talks in any room that looks interesting. This year, for the first time, this includes a “PHP and Friends” room – I’ll be organising this and I’m looking for your input, please.

Basically, we need to get some great submissions, so that when we come to choose the schedule (and it is only one track, one day, there’s only a few slots available), we can put together something really fitting to showcase PHP for a wider audience than a PHP conference. Selection will be done on the basis of talk topic, abstract and length in the first instance – we’ll only take into account the actual speakers when we’re curating the final list.

Key things you need to know:

  • link to call for papers form (google forms)
  • Event is 2nd (and 3rd, but the PHP room is on the 2nd) of February 2013, at ULB campus Solbosh in Brussels, Belgium
  • No expenses will be covered by the event
  • There’s also a Call for Stands if you have a project that you would like to represent there
  • If you’re not speaking, come and join us anyway!
29 Oct
2012

Confident Coding Report

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Confident Coding in San Francisco. This was a one-day event for mostly front-end developers, covering the things everyone seems to know but which seem like silly questions to ask – and it has an all-female speaker lineup.
Continue reading →
15 Oct
2012

Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Estelle Weyl

Happy Ada Lovelace day! Technically that’s in about half an hour as I write this in the UK but as I’m speaking at FOWA tomorrow morning, I will post this now before I get distracted. Ada Lovelace day is a day of celebrating women in science and technology, and one of the best ways to celebrate those women is to tell their stories. Every year, many woman will tell the story of a woman who has inspired them – you can find more stories on the FindingAda site.
15 Oct
2012

Introduction to PHP OOP

This is the first in a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I’m reposting them here.

Since the introduction of PHP 5 in 2004, PHP has had an object model worthy of that description and became a truly modern language for use on the web. Earlier PHP scripts would have been of the kind where, to quote from Alice’s Adventures, you would “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Nowadays that very procedural approach is less common in PHP, so this article takes a look at some of the basic object oriented features available in the language and shows some examples of using them with code examples.

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11 Oct
2012

Confident Coding: San Francisco

While I’m in the US in a week or so, I’ll be joining a stellar lineup at Confident Coding on October 20th in San Francisco. This is a by-women, for-women event to let us get together in a safe space where there are no stupid questions, and try to cover those tricks that it seems like everyone knows, but we all had to learn sometime!

Personally I’ll be speaking about git and also about SSH and things that are not FTP, and anything else I get asked about on the day. The variety of skills in the speaker lineup of this event, organised by the lovely @estellevw, is frankly imporessive and I can’t wait to meet all the speakers and attendees! I’m not often in the US at all (I’m a very reluctant traveller and I’m actually there for ZendCon the week after) so this is a rare opportunity for me.

The event is open to everyone, but if you don’t identify as female and you want to attend, please bring with you someone who does – and either way you can make use of my discount code! Simply buy a ticket, entering LORNA20 at the checkout for 20% off the ticket price.

Hope to see you there :)

09 Oct
2012

PHPNW Tutorial Day

I’ve spent the last few days at PHPNW – it was amazing and inspiring and incredibly sociable from beginning to end but I wanted to share some thoughts about tutorial day in particular. For context, I delivered a full-day tutorial at PHPNW this year, entitled “PHP Tools”, containing the following topics:

  • git
  • apache virtual hosts
  • api documentation
  • static analysis tools
  • profiling with xhprof
  • deployment with phing

Somewhere along the line my attendees were unexpectedly efficient (or I was impatient) and we ended up ahead of my planned schedule, so I asked if anyone had any questions to fill the final hour or so. Continue reading →

26 Sep
2012

Git Cheat Sheet

Today I thought I’d share my “cheat sheet” for git – the commands that I use on a day-to-day basis. I’ve used entirely the command line tools, since those are the same on every platform. GUI tools and IDE plugins are available for git so it is worth taking a look at what is available for the development environment you use.

Checkout/Clone

In git, you don’t checkout code, you clone a repository. You end up with a local repository on your filesystem, which behaves as both the repo and as your working copy. In git, you always clone the whole repo, not a subdirectory, and the metadata is all stored at the top level, in a directory called .git.

When you are ready to clone the repo, create the directory to store it in and change into it. Then type:

git clone [url]

Here’s an example, showing a clone of my private joind.in repo on github. Continue reading →

25 Sep
2012

Github API Access Tokens via Curl

I’m working on some demos for a tutorial I’m giving next month and since I’d like to show off Github’s API, I needed an access token for it. They have the usual web flow but I’m cutting as many corners as I can to keep the demos nice and quick, so I looked into the support Github has for generating an API key programmatically. Continue reading →
18 Sep
2012

API Documentation with IODocs

I write a lot of APIs, and I also preach that your API isn’t finished until it has excellent documentation. Which is great, but that means I therefore have to lead by example and document my APIs :) Enter iodocs from the talented folk at Mashery.

Iodocs is a node.js application (which is fun for a PHP developer. Most developers write a bit of JS, but this one hasn’t). You describe your API and all its methods in JSON, and then iodocs presents an interface for you to enter API keys, add parameters to each request and press the “try it!” button. This makes your API call and shows you the results on screen, which seems like a great way to demonstrate what all the various parameters do!

iodocs screenshot
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06 Sep
2012

Do Open Source with Git and Github

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 php|architect magazine.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren’t involved in open source, either because they don’t know how to approach a project, or because they just aren’t sure how the process even works. In this article we’ll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

The tl;dr Version for the Impatient

  1. Fork the main repo so you have your own github repo for the project
  2. Clone your repo onto your development machine
  3. Create a branch
  4. Make changes, commit them
  5. Push your new branch to your github repository
  6. Open a pull request

This article goes through this process in more detail, so you will be able to work with git and github projects as you please.
Continue reading →