Posted January 10th, 2012 by lineke
PHP Master by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland
reviewed by Kim
At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is “guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level”. Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted June 2nd, 2011 by lineke
About two weeks ago I attended the Dutch PHP Conference with many thanks to PHPWomen and Ibuildings for the ticket. So far I have attended almost all editions of the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC), I only missed one. So I knew it would be awesome before it even started and I was right! I arrived Thursday evening and spend the evening with some of the speakers and friends I know from other conferences and earlier editions of DPC. It was great to see everyone again.
So on Friday morning the first day of the conference started and it started with one of the best keynotes I have ever seen! Aral Balkan talked about User Experience. The talk was full of anekdotes and really inspirational. After that I attended the “TDD and getting paid” talk by Rowan Merewood. I had seen him speaking before and he is a great speaker with a lot of knowledge. Although I know quite a bit about TDD and Unittesting, the talk had a practical approach which was very interesting. The second talk of the day was about IPv6. It was a bit too technical for me and it somehow didn’t get my attention. After that it was already time for lunch.
After lunch I attended the Uncon. Last year was the first year there was an Uncon at DPC. I didn’t attend it back then, but this year the Uncon had some really interesting talks and I attended three of them during the two conference days. This talk was about the internals of DocBlox. DocBlox is a new tool, written by Mike van Riel, to replace phpDocumentor. It was interesting to see how he managed to reduce the amount of memory and time needed to generate the API documentation of a project. He even build his own Reflection API using the PHP tokenizer. Too bad the talk was only 45 minutes, because I would have liked to see more of it. Because it’s opensource I still can ofcourse, if I ever find the time. So then it was time for a talk by Stephan Höchdorfer about external depency management. It wasn’t quite what I expected unfortunately. After the break I decided to skip a session because I was really tired and the “hallway track” was also great, just talking to friends and relaxing. By then it was time for the last session of the day. It was a hard choice between Advanced OO Patterns and HTML5 for PHP developers. Since we are doing HTML5 at our company at the moment I decided for the HTML5 talk by Thorsten Rinne. It was an interesting overview of the new HTML5 functionality. So it was a really interesting first day of the conference.
Like every year there was a social organised and sponsored by Ibuildings, Github and Sanoma Media. In my opinion the place was too crowded and the music was too loud to actually have a conversation. So by the time I arrived most of the speakers and friends I wanted to speak to already moved to another bar right around the corner. We had a great evening and I made some new friends too. By the time I got to bed it was really late, so I forgot to set my alarm clock. I did wake up in time, but I was still really tired so I decided to skip the keynote about API’s by Helgi. Apparently it was a great keynote, at least that’s what everyone told me.
For me day two of the conference started with the presentation from Jouzas Kaziukenas about the new era of PHP frameworks. It was an interesting overview of the history and future of PHP frameworks. The two most used PHP frameworks are both working on a new major version which is PHP 5.3 only. If you missed the talk and still want to see it, you can at PfCongres in Utrecht, The Netherlands on September 17th. Next session was again an Uncon session for me about documentation. It sounded really interesting but somehow it didn’t get of the ground really well. At the end I finally managed to find out the talk was about Docbook, which sounded really interesting, but it was just too bad that the speaker didn’t get in the flow of the presentation so the story was a bit lost. I think Docbook is interesting and I certainly will look into it to see if we can use it at the company I work for. And then it was time for lunch again.
The talk I attended after lunch was by Ligaya Turmelle and Raymond DeRoo. They talked about Character sets in MySQL. Basically they said: Use Latin1 if you can, otherwise use UTF8. I asked them afterwards some advice for our own database since we are using utf8 and latin1. They confirmed what we already thought at the company that we should be using UTF8 only. Only because our application is international and we need to support different character sets. So thanks for the advice guys, luckily we were on the right track already! By then it was time for my last Uncon session about the PHP build tool Phing. I already knew about Phing because it comes with the database deployment system DbDeploy. I talked to the lead developer of Phing about changing the way DbDeploy works to fit our needs and got some great inspiration to change this (backwards compatible ofcourse) to fit our needs and hopefully the needs of more people looking for a database deployment system. After a short break it was time for the closing keynote from Cal Evans about Open Teams. I had already seen this keynote at the PHPBenelux conference in January, but it was very entertaining and good stuff to repeat from time to time.
And after the closing by Harrie Verveer DPC was over already. I had a great time, met old friends and made new friends and got new inspiration to last for at least a couple of months untill the next conference. DPC was awesome like it is every year!
Posted February 24th, 2010 by ElizabethN
I am thrilled to announce a new endeavor for PHPWomen: our PHPwomen Partnership Program for Open Source Projects. A little about the program:
PHPWomen has launched a partnership program for open source projects that are committed to embracing diversity and providing a welcoming and friendly atmosphere for contributors. We work closely with project leaders to identify specific areas of need, and will actively encourage our members to participate by promoting those needs through various channels. In return, the project leaders will ensure that newcomers to their projects will be welcomed and their contributions appreciated. This includes fostering an open and friendly environment for all newcomers, not just females.
Basically the goals of the Partnership Program are as follows:
We are so proud to announce that we have many projects already signed up for our partnership program, several of which have fantastic Statements of Diversity clearly displayed on their websites. These are all projects that value respectful communities and can be considered a safe environment for contributors. In other words, as a newcomer to their community, you won’t be harassed by a bunch of jerks, and your contributions will be valued.
For a complete list of our Open Source Project Partners, or to learn more about how the PHPWomen Partnership Program works, you can visit our OS Partnership Page. If you are interested in volunteering your time and energy in one of these fantastic projects, check out the OS Project Opportunity page. We will keep this page updated as often as possible, so we encourage you to visit it regularly.
And of course, if you are a Project Leader for an Open Source project, and you are interested in partnering with us, by all means contact me! We would love to tell our members all about your awesomeness. (elizabeth.at.naramore.dot.net.)
Posted February 5th, 2009 by lig
If you happen to be in Jacksonville, Florida on March 9th be sure to drop in and see us at the Florida Linux Show. We should have a small booth set up to sit and chat about whatever you wish.
Posted January 10th, 2009 by lig
Just wanted to bring everyone up to date on some things that are happening with PHPWomen
1) the site is currently being housed on a temporary server as we get ready to move it over to new hosting. A big thanks to Cal for hosting us the past 2 years! Because of it being on a temporary server, you may notice problems with the forums and/or links. We know of these are will be working to fix things up when we go to our next host.
2) PHPWomen.org is now a not-for-profit incorporation in the state of Florida. I have a couple of other things left to do (like get a tax id for us) but after that I hope to file for a 501(3)(c) tax exempt charity. This will more then likely to take quite a while to get – but we are at least on the road to it.
3) Various volunteers are currently trying to pick the top 3 photos for elephpant world tour. It is a hard choice and I do not envy them the choice.
Posted April 15th, 2008 by lig
Today has been a fabulous day – MySQL really knows how to throw a party… umm Conference. Yesterday had the tutorials and I have to admit that the ones I attended (Advanced Stored Procedures and Memcache) were incredibly interesting and highly relevant. Learned about some things that aren’t even documented in the manual as of yet. And afterwards had a fun time hanging out at the bar with the MySQLers (great guys one and all).
Today I have been “womaning” the booth (Thank you again MySQL and Oreilly for giving it to us) with the help of Sebastian Bergmann and Raj Shekher – handing out business cards and stickers – talking with men and women about our group in between the sessions I am attending (Lost Art of Self Joins, EXPLAIN Demystified, Replication Tips and Tricks). Next to me is the silverstripe CMS group – and they had a gave away for an ipod shuffle… and I won! Woot.
I love this place.
Posted March 5th, 2008 by lornajane
Leap Year Day, 29th February 2008, saw the annual London PHP Conference. PHPWomen were lucky enough to be able to get a stand at this conference to promote our organisation, and it was a great opportunity to get together and meet all the women that were able to be there. I didn’t get an exact count but I would say there we 20 women at the event … for a conference with 300 delegates that’s less than 7%, so it was fabulous to see so many there but its not a huge count!
What we lacked in numbers I think its fair to say we made up for in sheer enthusiasm. We took our phpwomen banner with us and it looked great tied to our stall. Maybe we should have learned from previous conferences but we didn’t take anything like as many t-shirts as people wanted, they were all gone by lunch time! It didn’t stop the torrent of people coming to the stand though, to chat to us, pick up a leaflet, or find out more about what the organisation is about.
We had a mascot too – one of the elephpants with a phpwomen branding of his own! Later in the day we also enticed visitors along with cake, which went down very well. I think the best way of expressing how much fun we had (and how much of an impact we made) is to refer you to the flickr photos.
A big thankyou to all the helpers – it was wonderful to meet you all and I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did!
Posted February 23rd, 2008 by KathyReid
BarCampMelbourne2008 was, simply put, AWESOME!
BarCampMelbourne2008 was held at Thoughtworks [wikipedia] at 155 Queen Street, Melbourne on 23 Feb 08, and had approximately 60 in attendance. Key observations from the day included:
My talk was on Deakin University‘s use of PHP over the last 8 years and showed how our practices and use of PHP had matured over that time, and what challenges still lie ahead for us.
Other notable presentations included:
Finally, last but not least, a very big thank you to Ben Balbo for organising the whole event, and making it such a success.
Posted February 5th, 2008 by lig
I am pleased and proud to announce that PHPWomen and DevChix have formed an alliance with each other that will hopefully help to strengthen both sites and their communities by providing mutual support. Working together we will hopefully be able to do much more then we would do apart.
I recently met with one of the founders of DevChix (Desi McAdam) for dinner and conversation. There we talked about our organizations and histories finding we had a huge number of things in common – from talks with others that led to our earliest beginnings to our shared workings to become a 501c3 tax exempt charity and our shared hope to help women come and be active in their respective coding communities. I had a wonderful time and want to thank Desi for taking the time out of her very busy schedule to meet and talk with me.
We at PHPWomen eagerly look forward to working with DevChix and are excited at what we can do together in the future.
Posted January 17th, 2008 by lig
PHP elePHPants – get your PHP elePHPants here.
Cal Evans from the Zend DevZone – being the awesome guy that he is – has graciously offered to mail out to the first 10 people who donate to PHPWomen $50 or more, a PHP elePHPant. Yep – you get one of the hard to find and much sought after plushy PHP elePHPants.
Isn’t he cute!
