Using an Existing Vagrant Setup for PHP Development

I’ve been hearing great things about puppet, chef, vagrant, and friends for a while now, but since I work on my own I tend to either develop straight onto my ubuntu machine or grab an appropriate existing VM and use that. So I read about this brave new world of virtualisation but (as with most tools) they can be hard to introduce on your own, and I didn’t.

Then I went to WhiskyWeb, which had a hackathon. I’m unclear on exactly what happened because my attention was elsewhere but it seems like @JayTaph showed off puppet and vagrant to @deizel*, who immediately built a vagrant setup for joind.in, which is an open source project that I’m currently leading. With the shiny new technology all packaged for me, I decided it was time to take a look! Continue reading

Upcoming PHP Courses

Since becoming freelance 18 months ago, I’ve taught a number of courses at my excellent local tech training centre, NTI Leeds. Over the next few months we’re running some one-day PHP courses (see my course dates page for more detail and the dates, all these are in Leeds although I’d like to run them elsewhere too), targeted at a particular area or set of skills. These are areas that I find myself delivering consultancy or training on frequently, or things I teach when I go places and realise these gaps exist in their knowledge. Does this match your experiences of “things I wish PHP developers knew – including me”? Continue reading