We are delighted to announce that our competition winner is Christian Schorn! Christian wins a pass which gives him access to the conference sessions for both DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) and DMC (Dutch Mobile Conference).
Thanks to everyone who left awesome comments on the post, we loved hearing your stories! If you didn't win, we still have some places available, so buy your tickets and we'll see you there!
Whisky Web is a brand new, fresh conference and the 2012 edition was the inaugural event, with hopefully many more to follow. This event has some familiar names from the PHP community behind it, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas and his helpers Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis.
The opening keynote from Josh Holmes was about learning how to fail, because everyone has to fail, not once but many times, because it's only by failing that we learn. So please never be afraid to make mistakes and never be afraid to ask for help. That's a great way to grow up personally and professionally in this industry.
In contrast, David Zuelke's closing keynote was deeply technical. He talked about RESTful web services and how to implement them. What I liked was the fact that in contrast to the current trend, where it seems JSON is the only answer to data transfer across web services and systems, David pushed heavily towards XML and the fact that XML is more descriptive and comprehensive than a JSON data structure. He made the important point that while XML can easily represent a JSON set of data, the opposite is not necessarily true.
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2 comments | April 27, 2012
Aral Balkan
We are the makers of the new everyday things. We design and develop the virtual pens, telephones, newspapers, calendars, and door-handles that people interact with every single day. We are the virtual architects and the products that we design and develop have the power to determine whether people have a good day or a bad day.
In this session, Aral Balkan will outline the important role that user experience design plays in the making of virtual products and inspire you to see that it is your job – regardless of whether you make web sites, mobile apps, intranet systems, or ticket machines – to make this new world that we are crafting together not only usable and accessible but beautiful, fun, inspiring, pleasurable, delightful, and – dare I say – magical.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (53.2MB)
Good news! We've managed to acquire a conference ticket for the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, on June 8th and 9th, to give away to our readers. We know that since you're reading techPortal, you are interested in technology in general and probably PHP in particular. The Dutch PHP Conference is one of the leading european conferences for PHP content and we hope you can join us there!
This year, we're running a sister conference alongside DPC - the very first Dutch Mobile Conference is being held! Your DPC ticket also gives you access to the mobile conference tracks, so whether you're into web, mobile, or a little bit of both - you're absolutely in the right place :)
We have some excellent speakers lined up for both conferences; check out the mobile conference schedule and the PHP conference schedule to see what kinds of sessions are available.
We're keeping it nice and simple! To win, simply leave us a comment on this post (including your email address so we can get in touch with you if you win!) telling us why you should win the ticket, and we'll randomly draw a winner when we close the competition on May 9th. Want to join us in Amsterdam? Then what are you waiting for?
(sadly we haven't got enough tickets to give away to everyone, so if you don't win then you can still buy tickets and we'll see you there!)
We recently wrapped up the first Ibuildings Challenge of 2012; a contest to create a Sismo notifier. At the moment Sismo ships with Growl, DBus, Google Talk and XMPP notifiers. They all extend the Sismo\Notifier to provide feedback to developers in a particular way. The task was to create a new notifier that was useful, creative or inspiring. This post announces the winners and makes some observations based on the submissions we received. (more...)
Rowan Merewood
Test-driven development is generally regarded as a good move: it should result in simple decoupled design, your tests tend to cover behaviour not methods, and far fewer bugs. However, just getting unit tests in on a real, commercial project is hard - switching to TDD is even harder. Defining concrete answers to a problem is hard and can be difficult to integrate into Often you can start a project with good intentions and coverage, then the deadline looms and the tests go out then the hacks come in. So, instead of beating ourselves up about not being perfect let's look at an interactive approach to adopting TDD principles. We'll look at tactics for selling TDD to your client, boss and colleagues. This talk will also cover methods for making TDD easier for you by showing you what tools you can use to integrate it into your development environment. In the project itself, we'll examine how we can make small but permanent steps towards full TDD, without losing that progress when deadlines hit. We'll also cover a few methods for learning on your own time and how the whole process can actually be made quite enjoyable.
You can find Rowan's slides on slideshare.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (48.8MB)
We all know that switching to Agile will solve all our problems. We can almost guarantee that adopting agile will be rewarded by a million per cent increase in productivity and ensure that we never miss a deadline ever again. It's all so fresh and buzzwordy - how can there be a downside?
Unfortunately, as with everything, this is not quite the case. Agile when utilised properly can have a positive effect on productivity, it can go some way to helping make deadlines easier to hit. But when used badly, it can have completely the opposite effect.
There are a number of problems, or 'smells', we have identified in the Agile process that could be having a negative impact on all your good intentions. Here we outline some of the smells you may find in various elements of the agile process and give you some tips on how to spot and eradicate them. (more...)
Sebastian Bergmann
Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. In this session you will learn how you can offset your technical debt with clean code that is readable and testable as well as reusable.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (89.0MB)
Have you been using MySQL for your web applications since your first foray into website development? Perhaps you now run, or are thinking about running, your own server and you will set up MySQL because that is what you have always used.
Did you know there are alternatives? A NoSQL database is one of them, and it has its use cases, but that will need some consideration, and almost certainly some rewriting of your application, to take advantage of. Instead, let me talk to you about some databases that speak your applications language, namely MySQL's client server protocol. (more...)
The venue for this years PHP UK Conference, The Business Design Centre in Islington, North London was a pretty good choice in my opinion. With over 600 delegates attending over the 2 days, the large lobby outside the three conference rooms provided a good space to mingle, check out the numerous display stands (whilst grabbing a few free goodies) and scan the selection of discounted books on offer from O'Reilly.
There were 34 sessions in all, however a number were repeated across both days. I guess it's hardly surprising as many visitors will attend just one of the two days, and it does give the super-keen amongst us the opportunity to grab more of the talks. (more...)
This year's PHP UK was my first, so I was not entirely sure what I should expect. Upon arriving at the business design centre, my first impression was that it is an excellent venue for a conference. So much so that two were running in parallel, Stampex - the British national stamp exhibition - being PHP UK's companion on both days. (more...)
Lorna Jane Mitchell
With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.
You can find Lorna's slides at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/oauth-7990565
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (86.4MB)
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