Author Archives: lornajane

21 Oct
2009

Pigeon Print

Recently I was working (I work from home) and I heard a really loud impact noise, like a football being kicked really really hard against something. At the moment my desk is in the attic, I looked at the cat, but he was asleep in the same room as me and hadn’t even looked up at the noise. I set off down the house, wondering if I needed to shout at next door’s kids for kicking the ball against something … and then I saw this

Pidgeon imprint

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t there earlier – this is my landing window so you walk past it all the time. A pigeon (I’m guessing) must have flown right into the window. I got a fright – but I can’t imagine how the bird felt!

15 Oct
2009

Book Review: PHP Team Development

I was recently contacted by Packt Publishing asking if I would review a copy of one of their new titles – PHP Team Development. I happily agreed and the book promptly arrived in the post (just in time for me to take it on holiday and read it by the pool!).

Overall I was quite disappointed by the book – although at least half of that was due to the poor written English contained there. Some sentences didn’t even make sense, I’m not accustomed to reading anything other than clear English (“Vendor Locking” confused me for a while), and the language in this publication made reading the whole thing rather slow going. That said, for a brand new team of PHP developers with no previous experience of working in a team, there were some useful points in this book. Its clear that the author’s experience lies in a large organisation building a single product, whereas I’d say the level of this book would apply well to web development shops with a handful of developers probably working on a series of different projects for clients.

There are some solid concepts introduced – few are explained in detail though and after a couple of chapters I think a less experienced developer would have had a list of terms to look up rather than new ideas to try! Still, there are good explanations of source control, MVC, templating, and OOP elsewhere on the web and in other books so it would be possible for someone to follow up on this. I was particularly alarmed at the concept where one team writes the model, another writes the view and yet another writes the controller to tie them all together. Perhaps in big enough development teams, with a lot of up-front specifications written, this can work. My on-the-ground experience though would lead me to group tasks together by feature rather than separate them by bits of implementation – I currently work in an organisation that uses agile projects though where features are the whole point of the exercise, so perhaps that influences me.

On the whole, a perfectly nice book for beginners (available from the publishers or from Amazon)
but if you are already working in a team then you probably won’t get a lot from this experience.

13 Oct
2009

PHPNW09: In Conclusion

Last weekend was the second annual PHP North West Conference, held at Manchester Conference Centre and attended by 200 people. We kicked off our weekend on Friday night, with a pre-conference social in a pub near to the conference venue. There wasn’t really enough space but it contained geeky things and sold actual beer, which seemed appropriate. Saturday morning saw the delegates arriving bright and early, ready for our Keynote from Kevlin Henney “The Uncertainty Principle”. He had a whole room full of developers laughing along with him in the early morning – what a great session :)

Next up it was my turn to speak – speaking at a conference that you’re also organising and doing the paper selection for has been a bit of a strange experience, I’d never say “never again” but both things detracted from the other slightly. My talk was “Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World”, which is a re-take of the Joel Test, adapted for web development – its a nice opportunity for me to get some of my thoughts across on a range of best practices and the slides are available online. Once I began speaking and my nerves got out of the way, I almost enjoyed myself – I got some great questions from people in the bar in the evening as well, hopefully I’ll be giving that talk again some time. We used joind.in to allow our attendees to leave feedback – they were great and the comments are still coming in. I was blown away by the feedback on my own talk however – conference organisers please take note!

The rest of the day was a whirl of organisation, chatting with people in the hallway, and catching a few bits and pieces of talks – I did see more talks this year than last year though which I was very pleased about. At the end of the day we had a session with some content from our premier sponsor Microsoft, a whole bunch of giveaways, and I was able to take the microphone once more to thank the organisers, particularly Jeremy and his team from Solution Perspective Media – after which it was time to party. The food was excellent all day, and Sun had put money behind the bar which took us almost all night to drink, they definitely financed some sizeable hangovers!

This year for the first time we also had an informal day on the Sunday, this was something I was deeply involved with organising and I think it went pretty well. Arriving ten minutes before the start time to find speakers, attendees, and a venue with the cafe already open was a welcome surprise before 9am on a Sunday morning! The five speakers that morning were a mix of experienced speakers, new speakers, core PHP topics and a few allied technologies. Plenty of people dropped in to hear a session or two and explore MOSI through the morning, I think it was a nice addition to the schedule.

All that remains is to extend a huge thanks to our speakers, helpers, sponsors and of course the attendees – if you were there I hope you had a great time!

12 Oct
2009

PHP Code Sniffer Tutorial on Techportal

I’m pleased to announce that a my tutorial on using PHP Code Sniffer is now available on techportal. I had the opportunity to work with PHPCS in a recent project and thought it was a great tool, and looked more closely into how it works and can be configured. I learned so much along the way that I’ve put my findings together into a tutorial designed to enable others to pick up and start using this tool in their projects – I hope it helps someone :)
05 Oct
2009

Portugal and The Internet Cafe

Things may have seemed a bit quiet around here lately – that’s because I spent last week in the Algarve in southern Portugal. My sister is working in a hotel there as head nanny, I think she’s spent 8 days of 2009 in the UK so this is about the only way to get to visit her, a beach holiday!

Despite the holiday I still had a lot on my to-do list so I took my netbook with me, and got my sister to show me the local internet cafe – it was a great place and worthy of mention, so thanks very much to Hugo Beaty in Praia Da Luz for a stable connection and good coffee :) It was good enough to work from, I almost wished I’d gone for longer and not taken holiday (I telecommute, nobody would notice!)

If anyone is interested, there are a few photos in a flickr set of the trip.

29 Sep
2009

PHPNW09: Weekend of PHP and Fun

Having just put the finishing touches to the schedule for PHPNW09, I’m realising just how excited I am about this event coming up in less than a fortnight. This is the second year we’ve run the event, and its bigger and better than last year – and I know what a great crowd to expect! We kick off in Manchester on Friday 9th October for a pre-conference social, with the main event on Saturday and follow this, naturally, with another party! Since so many people are there for the weekend we’ve also taken some conference space for Sunday morning and begged a few more speakers to hang around and share their knowledge with those people who are staying for the weekend. (The Sunday speakers get no speaker package and they were all very gracious about having their arms twisted … we can’t thank them enough!)

The full schedule is now published with both Saturday and Sunday sessions now published along with timings for each. Although this is a local conference with a budget ticket price and organised by volunteers, the lineup would not look out of place at any other event on the PHP calendar – and we’d like to thank all the speakers that submitted talks to us, regardless of whether we managed to find time in the schedule for them. The submitters, the speakers, the helpers and the attendees are what makes this conference what it is – and I can’t wait! See you in Manchester :)

28 Sep
2009

Working at The Hub, Bristol

A couple of weeks ago I had some friends coming to the UK for a little while, but they were staying in Bristol and I live in Leeds. My weekends were pretty full so I wasn’t sure if I would get to see them – but since I telecommute I can work from anywhere with a decent connection and some quiet space. A friend recommended The Hub in Bristol, so I worked from there for the day.

Its a great place, I haven’t been to Bristol before and the views are rather good since the space is on the top floor. There was plenty of desk space and both wired and wireless connections available and they also have meeting rooms which were getting some good use the day I was there. The atmosphere was friendly and everyone had a smile for me, even though I was a stranger and only there for the day. The office is part-shared by sustrans so there were other nice ethical touches, like fairtrade tea and coffee and a good selection of recycling options.

I had a great day and will be looking out for opportunities to use The Hub again – either in Bristol or elsewhere. Thanks!

25 Sep
2009

Speaking at PHP Barcelona

I’m delighted to announce I’ll be speaking at the PHP Barcelona Conference in October. This is a new speaking topic for me, although I’ve been working and blogging in this area for a while, with a talk entitled “Working with Web Services”. Its a very technical session looking at different types of services and the tools available for working with them. We’ll also delve into overviews of how these services actually work and how we can troubleshoot when things go wrong. I’m really excited about writing and delivering this talk topic, and equally excited about my first trip to Barcelona and meeting lots of new people in the PHP community in Spain. If you are going – hope to see you there, come and say hi :)
22 Sep
2009

Lame Excuses for Avoiding Conferences

At the moment I am getting to quite a few conferences, as a speaker, as an organiser, and sometimes as a plain old attendee. I get so much from these opportunities to learn from experts in their various fields, meet people in the flesh whose blogs I read or whom I know from IRC. I also hugely value the opportunity to socialse and build personal connections, and to be a bystander for technical conversations between leaders where I understand most of the words but can barely follow the flow. I can quite appreciate that different people come to conferences for different reasons, but I cannot accept that people actively avoid conferences because they think its not for them – and the reasons for this, from people who have never been to a conference, are wild and varied. Most are based on misconceptions and I’d like to take the time to examine some of these.

I won’t know anyone

This situation will persist until you go to a conference and meet some people! Then, you’ll know some people at the next event. When I went to IPC in Frankfurt in 2007, I knew nobody but while I was there I met Derick, Sebastian and Zoe … and these three are now conference friends wherever I go! Lots of people at conferences are there on their own and will be happy to chat to you and find out who you are.

Its too expensive

While I’m lucky enough to have the support of my employers, Ibuildings, to send me to at least a couple of conferences per year, I’ve worked for plenty of other organisations that didn’t invest in their people. I think this is unforgivable but the reality is there are plenty of us in this situation. If you are paying your own way to these events I can appreciate that $1100 (~700 GBP) plus international flights plus a week in a hotel in Silicon Valley can seem pretty expensive if you want to get to ZendCon. But there are cheaper and closer conferences are available for most of us – so do your homework and get to something you can afford, even if you don’t do it every year. I’ve yet to get to a conference where the cost outweighed the benefit so in my view this excuse is invalid.

My employer won’t pay

No, well, see previous point. This is true for plenty of people and while I don’t have any numbers on people paying their own way – they do exist and they almost invariably move on to work for employers that do invest in their future. Do this for you, not for them.

I might have to talk to people/strangers

This is the excuse I hear the most often, or a variation on this. Actually you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. I went to an event last year and introduced myself to a guy who said “Hi, I’m James. I don’t have any social skills” and proceeded to say nothing further (his name may or may not have been James, I can’t really remember). To be honest I didn’t really think anything of it. Conferences are firstly about the technical content so if you want to come and get the technical sessions and then disappear again – that is your call. I can’t agree this is a good idea but there is absolutely no pressure to be the life and soul of the party, and in fact if you want to sit in the corner and mutter to yourself that is also fine … we’re all geeks after all! Nobody will judge you, in fact if you don’t talk to anyone probably nobody will notice you – just COME and you might be surprised :)

I haven’t been to a conference

Why not? Pick an event you like the sound of, join in the preconference hype (more about this in my post about making friends at a conference) and see how it goes. If you hate it, then don’t go to another. But don’t stay home immobilised by lack of experience, you’re missing out :)

Avoiding Conferences

Getting to a conference costs time, money and effort and if you don’t want to invest any of those things in your professional development then I respect your decision. However if you think you’d like to attend something, but you don’t know what to expect or you have concerns about what is expected of you, then try to put those fears aside and dive in! I think I’ve covered the things I hear most often – what excuses do you hear from conference-avoiders?