TBNL

The yearly dutch PHP event is getting close so time to check out the schedule. Once again there are lots of interesting sessions to choose from so I probably will miss some of the good stuff. Mixing ‘simply interesting’ and ‘directly usable in day-to-day job’ results in the preliminary list:

Day 1

• TDD and Getting Paid – Because indeed TDD is good and can be hard to keep doing thoroughly
• Pursuing practices of Domain-Driven Design in PHP – Fits both the ‘interesting’ and ‘directly usable’ categories. Based on the numerous articles by Giorgio I have high expectations
• Cooking up your development environment – Tools I don’t know, yet a subject that’s very real
• Simplify your external dependency management – Or the Uncon, depending on the schedule
• Implementing Comet using PHP – Interesting new stuff (for me that is)
• Zend Framework 2.0: what’s new and what’s changed? – However, Advanced OO Patterns looks interesting too
• Conference social – yup

Day 2

• Pofiling, OAuth, new era of PHP Frameworks – All interesting, to be decided
• Managing a shared MySQL farm – Because I expect to hear more new things than at the Zend Framework optimization talk
• Agility and Quality, Modular application architecture and Character sets that suck (they do!) – Tough one once again. I think Agility and Quality
• Practical Git – I think, because there’s a lot to learn there, although Zend Framework i18n looks interesting too
• Keynote: Open Teams – Will probably be insightful as well as enjoyable

Now I only need to print the ticket, bookmark this page on my iPhone and I’m off to go. Till friday!

Past weekend the Amsterdam RAI was the centre of the PHP universe as there the 2010 edition of the Dutch PHP Conference was held. Similar to past year it consisted of two presentation days, which I attended, preceded by a tutorial day.

Among the presentations I attended on the first day were:

Kevlin Henney’s keynote presentation, titled 97 Things every programmer should know. I suppose every attendant will have recognised some of the things he addressed, like “Do lots of deliberate practice” or “Hard work does not pay off”.

Design for Reusability. In this presentation Derick Rethans showed a number of concepts that can help in making code more reusable. Topics included Dependency Injection Containers, the fact that private methods can never be tested and Tie-Ins. Interesting was that Derick stated that reflection is slow whereas on day 2, in the Doctrine 2 uncon talk reflection was said to be be reasonably fast (in php 5.3 that is).

Database version control by Harrie Verveer was a very interesting talk, if only for the fact that it is a topic I’m confronted with at my day job. He showed tools like DbDeploy (and Phing), Liquibase, Doctrine Migrations and Akrabat DB Schema Manager. Especially ineresting was how branching can trouble database versioning.

Stephan Hockdoerfer’s presentation Testing untestable code showed some very unorthodox examples of how to test code that seems untestable, like replacing function names, manipulating the include path or mocking the filesystem. Interesting and besides that it’s great stuff to scare co-workers with (“look what trick I’ve learned!”).

Due to an unlucky combination of a tiresome week, a busy schedule ahead, a lot of time to kill until 20:30, and possibly age, I missed the social, so I was not devastated when day 2 started.

First presentation of day 2 was titled Security Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behaviour by Chris Shiflet. Emphasis was not on the technical aspects but on the people using an application. The presentation contained a very effective demonstration of ‘change blindness’. Quote of the presentation, and as far as I’m concerned whole DPC10: ” If you focus on the technical problem you’re missing the actual problem”

Following the keynote talk, Rob Allen covered the topic of Stress-free deployment. There was some overlap with the database versioning talk of the previous day but still a lot to learn. Especial interesting I found the part about branching, where Rob showed how branching features as well as releases can be a good solution for some pitfals concerned with release management. Not entirely in line with the branching ‘problems’ mentioned in the database versioning talk so it’s definitely a subject I’ll look into further.

After the lunch I visited the Unconference room which I didn’t regret. Jeroen Keppens opened with a short presentation on a topic we need to look into at my job in the near future: Integrating Zend_Acl and the domain layer. Short but very insightful. After two presentations about development for mobile devices (PhoneGap looks very interesting) and Cairo I decided to stay in the uncon room some more (thereby skipping the Domain NoSQL talk) as next on were two ORM-centered presentations: First Juozas Kaziukenas explained the principles of an ORM, followed by Benjamin Eberlei giving insight on Doctrine2. That looked promising yet also, after viewing the generated SQL of some of the more complex examples, spawned a very interesting discussion I had with my co-worker who visited Sebastian Bergmann’s presentation The Cake is A Lie: What problems can arise from generated code that isn’t tested and nobody is responsible for?

Concluding: Similar to past years this was a refreshing event that fuels the urge to improve by adopting new techniques and better methodologies. Besides that I really liked the Unconference initiative. Till next year!

• DPC 2010 slides (joind.in)
• Twitter: #dpc10 and #dpc_uncon

The biggest PHP event in Holland is over. Two great days have passed and it feels like it were just two hours. I didn’t attend the tutorial day so at friday after a brief intro by Cal Evans (with great cartoony visuals) the event kicked off with the opening keynote by Andrei Zmievski. A talk about what makes PHP the language it is and about where PHP is heading with 5.3 and 6. It had humor, appealing imagery and a nice metaphor comparing PHP to a ball of nails: ‘whatever you throw it at it sticks to’. For me what showed the maturity of PHP, was the fact PHP6 is undergoing (or will so) compatibility tests with respect to packages like Drupal, WordPress and Zend Framework.
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Today I ordered my ticket for Dutch PHP Conference. Last year’s edition was great and this year it’s twice as long. This year I’ll skip the tutorial day though. For me the money is better spent on reading material. Anyone interested in going can save some money by registering before April 30th. My ‘usability and PHP’ paper didn’t make it but on the less PHP focused topics there is accessibility. And a lot of other interesting topics. Presentations I will probably be attending: All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP, Secure Programming with the Zend Framework and Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications.

Last night there was a phpGG (dutch php user group) meeting in Utrecht with a presentation by Lorna Jane titled ‘Linux-Fu’. Attended by about 10 people, console basics & tricks were addressed. I’m not unfamiliar with Linux so the basics weren’t that new. For development I mainly use IDE’s so I just use the console to edit the occasional config file, create some symlinks, that kind of stuff. For those tasks I find myself sticking to set of commands I’ve learned and just occasionally taking the time to do an in-depth google search for better ways to get the job done. So with regard to linux shell trickery there are things to learn for me. Neat timesavers:

Switching between current and previous directory:

cd -

Going home can be done without the ~:

cd

How ‘grep’ can beat your IDE. I’ve been playing around a bit and this is really a quick way of finding all classes within a directory that implement an interface (and it’s fast!):

grep -i -r 'class ' . | grep implements

And there’s ‘screen’. Very useful for handling multiple terminal sessions without the risk of losing them all due to a connection hick-up. Lorna has some config examples on her site.

So not all was new but there were definitely some nice starting points to investigate further.