Posts by: Lorna Mitchell

• Announcing the DPC12 CfP (and a Mobile Conference) January 26, 2012

  It's that time of year again; the Dutch PHP Conference has announced its dates (7-9th June 2012) and the call for papers is now open!

  This year, the conference expands into a new dimension with the addition of a new sister conference, the Dutch Mobile Conference, running alongside DPC. All attendees will get access to both events. The addition of an additional strand to the conference is a response to the situation as we see it in industry. Our clients need mobile solutions alongside their web applications, and developers increasingly work across both web and mobile disciplines.

  Call for Papers

  The calls for papers for both events are open now and we'd be delighted to hear from you. You don't necessarily need previous speaking experience (but tell us if you have), you just need a great topic - and for these events, the more technical, the better! The URLs you need to submit your talk are http://www.phpconference.nl/call-for-papers and http://www.mobileconference.nl/call-for-papers - we can't wait to see what you come up with, but you need to be quick! The calls for papers close on Tuesday 31st January.

  Come to the Conference!

  Hopefully you've been enjoying our DPCRadio series, where we share the recordings from last year's PHP conference (if not, you can catch up on the DPCRadio page). This year will be bigger and better than ever, and we are sure you'll love the new mobile elements of the event as well - so come and join us, 7th-9th June in sunny* Amsterdam!

  To follow along with the news from both events, follow our twitter accounts @DPCon and @DMConf.

  * sunshine not guaranteed

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Video Interview: Chris Shiflett March 30, 2011

  Today we're delighted to bring you another video interview from last year's Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. We're getting excited about this year's event (you can find the schedule here and if you want to join us then registration is open) so it seemed like a great time to bring you a reminder of one of the most memorable talks from last year. Enjoy!

  Interview with Chris Shiflett from Ibuildings on Vimeo.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Win A Ticket to DPC11! February 25, 2011

  I'm wildly excited to announce that we have a ticket to give away for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011!! The conference is entirely English-language (although you will hear many languages spoken in the hallways!), and takes place in Amsterdam between 19th and 21st May 2011. The schedule is online now, and it promises three days of really excellent technical content from some of the leaders of the PHP Community from Europe and beyond. The tickets are on sale already; bookmark this link in case you don't win the ticket :)

  How To Win

  We have a ticket to give away which will grant access to the main conference days at the Dutch PHP Conference – so if you can get to Amsterdam in May, and you want a pass, simply leave a comment on this post with a valid email address and we will pick a lucky winner at random! Make sure to leave your comment before 18th March, when we’ll be doing the draw to choose a winner.

  Update: Many thanks to everyone who commented, if only there were enough tickets for everyone! The winner has now been drawn and will be notified in due course.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Happy Birthday TechPortal February 16, 2011

  It doesn't seem like 2 years since we launched techPortal as Ibuildings' developer portal, but the calendar indicates that this is true! There have been some great posts on this site since then and we would like to share some highlights with you in case you missed them. Here are our top posts for the last two years:

  • Scaling Web Applications With HMVC - Sam de Freyssinet
  • Graphs In The Database - Lorenzo Alberton
  • Getting Started with phpUnderControl - Marc Veldman
  • Profiling with XHProf - Lorenzo Alberton
  • Database Version Control - Harrie Verveer

  As well as the regular blog content on techPortal, we run a podcast series featuring the sessions from the Dutch PHP Conference, also hosted by Ibuildings. This is a great way to share the content from the conference to keep everyone supplied all year while they wait for the next edition. The episodes show up in our main feed, or you can find itunes and dedicated RSS feeds on the DPCRadio page. If you like what you hear, the next Dutch PHP Conference will be (in English) in Amsterdam on May 19th-21st; we hope you will join us!

  TechPortal was created to celebrate the developer community at Ibuildings and their various achievements, and we like to celebrate our people outside of their day jobs. With that in mind, take a moment to check out Planet Ibuildings, a syndication of what our developers are writing about in their own time. You can also subscribe to the Planet Ibuildings feed, if you wish.

  Happy birthday to you, TechPortal, here's to another successful and inspiring year!

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• DPC 2010: Sessions and Slides June 14, 2010

  The Dutch PHP Conference is over for another year - we had a wonderful time hosting you all in Amsterdam and we were delighted so many people were able to join us for 3 days of serious technical learning (with some beer on the side of course!). While the event itself has finished, the content will live on in our DPC Radio podcast series, where we'll be broadcasting audio from the main tracks at the conference through the year. Plenty of the speakers have already uploaded their slides, read on for a breakdown of ratings and links to slides for those talks that have them - and don't forget to rate all the talks you saw on joind.in! (You can leave general event info too - click on the comments tab on the events page)

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• Web Services for PHP Developers June 1, 2010

  In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

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• Tips for Working with DateTime in PHP April 29, 2010

  Recently we published a post about tips for dates and times in PHP, today I thought I'd follow on from Michael and add some more tips. In PHP 5.2 there is an object oriented approach to working with dates and times - the DateTime class! In the newer PHP 5.3 versions even more excellent functionality was added. This is a short post to introduce this functionality with a focus on the methods available in PHP 5.2 showing some simple examples of how we can more easily manipulate and display dates without needing to work with timestamps.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• DPC Ticket Competition Winner Announced March 22, 2010

  I'm delighted to announce the winner of our competition to win a ticket to DPC - congratulations to randomly-selected winner Andreis Mooij!!

  A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to enter, we were overwhelmed by both the quality and the quantity of the responses on the post - 89 comments in total!! I do hope that some the other commenters will be able to join us in any case - if you're thinking of coming then do book your tickets soon at http://phpconference.nl/register - Early Bird prices end on April 30th.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Win Tickets to the Dutch PHP Conference February 18, 2010

  In addition to my role as editor-in-chief here at techPortal, I am lucky enough to be able to get involved with some of the other cool things that Ibuildings does. This year that includes the opportunity to host the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam in June, which is very exciting! We've been busy putting everything in place for the event and our schedule is now available over at http://phpconference.nl/schedule (go check it out, I'll wait).

  So now you've seen the schedule, you probably want to join us! The tickets are on sale over at http://phpconference.nl/register - the early bird tickets run until the end of April and I hope many of the readers of techPortal will be able to make it. Since its an Ibuildings event there will be plenty of familiar faces from the authors you see posting here, and some of them will also be speaking at the event! We've also got a special opportunity for techportal readers ...
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• phploc: PHP Lines of Code January 28, 2010

  With the growing use of continuous integration and static analysis tools hooked into those processes, there is a particular analysis tool that is very useful but rarely mentioned: phploc, the PHP Lines of Code tool. This has been a feature of PHPUnit for some time but has been released as a separate project in the phpunit pear channel. The nature of PHPUnit means that many of these statistics can be collected while the tests are running, which is why it was added to that tool in the first instance.

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• New Editor-in-Chief at techPortal November 4, 2009

  Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I'm your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

  This portal was created and managed by Cal Evans and at Ibuildings we will always thank him for doing such a wonderful job in getting this venture set up and pointed in the right direction. As he moves on to new challenges, I will be stepping up to continue this initiative and see it grow further. Cal is a tough act to follow but I am delighted to have the opportunity to try.

  If you have any comments about the site or would like to contact me, I can be reached at techportal@ibuildings.com and I'm always pleased to received feedback. Before I sign off, I'd like to say a big thanks to all our readers - I hope you continue to enjoy techPortal!

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Using PHP_Code_Sniffer October 12, 2009

   

  PHP Code Sniffer (PHPCS) is a package for syntax checking, available from PEAR. It can check code against defined rules covering anything from whitespace through doc comments to variable naming conventions and beyond. In this article we'll look at getting started with PHPCS, using it to syntax check our files, and go further to look at how the rules are create and the standards defined.

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• New Memcached Extension for PHP June 22, 2009

  Earlier in the year, a new memcache extension was released for PHP by Andrei Zmievski, Core PHP Developer and Open Source Fellow at Digg.com. The extension is for dealing with memcache from PHP, and is called memcached (not to be confused with the existing extension, "memcache"). The idea behind the new extension is to leverage the functionality contained libmemcached - a solution which has been widely adopted across many scripting communities and beyond. The extension is available in PECL and has lots of shiny new functionality. This article looks at how to obtain and work with the new extension, and also shows off a couple of the new features it includes.

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• DPC Sessions and Slides June 15, 2009

  The Dutch PHP Conference 2009 is in the history books now but the spirit of sharing that went on there continues. For the attendees, the friendships made are priceless, and the exchange of ideas is a large part of the value of the conference. We can't duplicate the in-person experience, nor would we want to try. However, for those who were not able to attend, or for the attendees that need a refresher on the concepts learned, we are making this central repository available. We will link to the slides as we are made aware of them by the speakers. Not all speakers will release slides or audio and that is fine with us. However, those speakers who do release them, this list will server as the official repository.

  We will release the audio from the speakers who have given us permission. They will be released approximately once every two weeks here on techPortal. Check back often to see what is new and take part in the discussion on the sessions that have been released.

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• Getting Started with Memcached February 16, 2009

  Memcache is a tool which can cache objects in memory – and is often used for speeding up dynamic web applications. PHP has a built-in module for working with memcache, and its a simple and convenient way of introducing caching to your application.

  PHP has a PECL module for talking to memcached – look up how to install for your system, but be aware that it isn't bundled. It's a good module to include on your system however, quite a few apps will take advantage of it where available.

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