Mapping Seven Things

Trying to get a bit of overview of all people who have put up their "Seven Things" list, I created a little map that shows who tagged who with an overview of the most tagged persons.

Check out the Seven Things map at http://in2it.be/whotaggedwho.php.

Seven Things - Tagged by Rob Allen

I was surprised that I made it to the Seven Things thread started by Tony Bibbs, but Rob Allen was so kind to "tag" me and now it's my honor to find seven more victims.

Seven Things you might not know about me:

• When I was 16, I had a private pilot license (PPL) learned at the Airport of Antwerp. The first year I managed to have enough flying hours to keep my permit but the second year I just couldn't find time to have the minimum required hours to keep my permit. Looking back at this moment in time, I do find it sad I didn't made the effort in maintaining this.
  
• I graduated high-school as an accountant and had a job as a junior accountant at the Benelux head office of Century21, but after one month I was already convinced being an accountant was something I didn't wanted to do for the rest of my life. And never spoke of this part in my life again.
• I never finished college. I was studying IT at the "Hogeschool Antwerpen" and after college hours I worked at the customer care center of an European ISP called World Online (no longer exists). When doing my second year IT they offered me a job as developer and I accepted the offer.
• I met my wife during a LAN party at Telenet (Belgian Telco), where I was working as an in-house developer and my wife was on her last day as security guard (student job).
• I'm Dutch, although I'm living in Belgium.
• My wife told me we were pregnant on the last evening of ZendCon07 and I celebrated this news in a StarBucks shop just around the corner of the Motel6 I was staying at.
  
• Our son was born on Father's day being the best gift a dad could wish for.

 Now it's my turn to tag people:

• Jay Pipes, a wonderful guy I met at ZendCon08 showing us there's a whole lot more stuff MySQL has to offer.
• Maarten Balliauw, a great PHP/.NET developer who's career I've been following for several years now but only met personally about a month ago.
• Patrick Allaert, co-manager of PHPBelgium and a great mind within the open-source community.
• Matthew Turland, whom I've met at ZendCon07 and again at ZendCon08 who's given me great hints and tips with his podcast on site scraping and his blog. Already tagged by Keith Casey, Matthew Weier O' Phinney, Rob Allen and Me.
• Damien Seguy, the father of elePHPant and founder of nexen.net.
• Christian Flickinger, the awsome dude I met at ZendCon07/08 who always knows how to turn things into a lot of fun.
• Nick Belhomme, a Belgian PHP developer who first contacted me asking about doing PHP on a freelance base and now becoming a dear friend.
• Sara Golemon, PHP guru at Yahoo! and who I've met also at ZendCon07/08.
  

For my tagged victimes, do follow the following rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Looking back to 2008

First I want to wish everyone all the best for 2009 ! 2008 has been a very wonderful year and makes us looking positive to the future. To cope with the challenges we have to face in 2009, it doesn't hurt looking back to the past year and see where we can improve or act differently.


Let me go over a few keywords that had importance in 2008.

PHPBelgium
2008 was the year both Felix De Vliegher and I founded PHPBelgium, a PHP user group for PHP enthusiasts in Belgium. We had a slow start, but as the months passed by the popularity and importance of PHPBelgium grew. Not only for PHP enthusiasts but also for companies as Microsoft, O'Reilly, Ibuildings and AUSY. In October, Patrick Allaert joined our management team.

Besides providing best practices and presenting advanced programming topics, we also try to do as much as possible for the community by giving away elePHPants, books and tickets to PHP conferences (like ZendCon, php|works and phpnw).

phpGG
Besides a good start up for PHPBelgium, the Dutch counterpart phpGG had also a very successful re-start in 2008. With more meetings, activities and combining forces with PHPBelgium to organize two very succesful theme-days (PHP Test Fest and BugHuntDay), they now are the most important PHP user group in the Netherlands.

Baby Xander
For me personally, 2008 was the best year ever with the birth of our son Xander. In the past 6 months he has grown into a very curious, enthusiastic and happy baby boy. Both my wife and I enjoy each day we can spend with him, seeing him discovering new things, learning new stuff and becoming very familiar with his surroundings. It's like watching a million years of evolution taking place in only a few months.

Ibuildings
2008 is also the year for Ibuildings, becoming Europe's leading PHP professional services company. They first started in 1999 in Flushing, the Netherlands and extended their reach to the UK at the end of 2007. They are internationally credited as being an expert in PHP and related technologies, raising the bar on professional services and quality assurance. To quote the international PHP community: "Ibuildings is the new black", and I have to admit it's true.

Job Changes
I think 2008 is also the year where a lot of people changed jobs, including myself. But I think the most thrilling news was that Cal Evans changed shirts, from Zend to Ibuildings.

Namespaces
PHP 5.3 is about to reach its final stadium, but there was a HOT discussion for it's namespace implementation. I didn't follow the whole discussion, so I'm only reflecting here what the buzz was on almost all PHP channels.

Yes, we can !
2008 is also the year that an African-American won the presidential elections in the US. Although it has nothing to do with PHP, it sure is worth mentioning it here in my 2008 overview.

Obama's quote "Yes, we can !" does not only reflect on his mission in the White House but also for all PHP developers in the world. "Yes, we can !" will also be our default answer in regards to web application development, rich internet applications, social community projects and so much more. Yes, we can !

Zend Framework
I think it's fair to say that 2008 was also the year for Zend Framework, with over 10 million downloads (and counting), becoming the leading framework for enterprise web application development (and also large scale websites).

With the introduction of a certification exam for Zend Framework (ZFCE), Zend has enormously boosted the professional level of this powerful framework and with initiatives like BugHuntDay, the community involvement has increased a lot.

Also books like "PHP|Architect's Guide to programming with Zend Framework" by Cal Evans and "Zend Framework in Action" by Rob Allan, have boosted Zend Framework's popularity. And of course the many blogs and presentations that are too numerous to mention here have added their share to it's popularity.

Credit Crunch
We cannot neglect the fact that we're right in the middle of a financial crisis, refered to as the "credit crunch". I wish I could say it was something of 2008, but it will have effects in 2009 as well.

The credit crunch has effects in many industries, including the IT industry. Many large IT companies are faced with layoffs and this will continue to be a reality in 2009 as well.

But given the nature of PHP, being an open-source programming language, with a non-expensive nature and a rapid deployment history, this financial crisis might become a lucrative moment for PHP development in general. This thought is also shared by Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings who mentioned it in a blog post reflecting 2008.

Thank you !
Of course, 2008 has been a wonderful year for me, mostly because of you. Giving me constructive comments on my blog posts, meeting me at conferences and congratulating me on presentations that I share on slideshare.com. So, thank you for all the love !!!

Book review: Zend Studio for Eclipse - Developer's Guide

Book: Zend Studio for Eclipse, Developer's Guide
Authors: Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pearson Education

Description
Zend Studio for Eclipse, Developer's Guide from Addison-Wesley Pearson Education is a guide to Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for intermediate to advanced developers.

The book has 18 chapters, with the first 16 covering the different views and preference settings for each specific task. The first 5 chapters are explaining basically the layout of the Eclipse working environment, with a focus on how to modify these views for your own benefit. The last 2 chapters are devoted to working out an example application using ZSE with Zend Framework.

Personal opinion
This book is in my opinion a beginner's guide into using ZSE, aiming at PHP developers that have a knowledge of general concepts like versioning, debugging and refactoring. I personally was hoping to see advanced settings to tune the IDE into a powerful developer's tool, but it was merely a basic explanation with the correct terminology for a product that I've been using well over two years now (yes, I was also beta-tester for it).

Conclusion
If you're new to Eclipse in general and specifically Zend Studio for Eclipse, I believe this book is going to be a valuable asset. It will not only give you insight in how the Eclipse IDE works, but it shows you also the possibilities to turn this into a very powerful tool for building PHP applications.

But if you're already a ZSE veteran I'd have to advice not to buy this book since it has no extra value then to explain the settings/views you've been using all along.

Successful 6th annual FeWeb Conference

Yesterday evening I attended the 6th annual FeWeb Conference in Edegem, Belgium with my Ibuidlings collegues Ivo Jansch, Harrie Verveer and Bjorn de Haan. Also fellow co-founder of PHPBelgium and soon-to-be collegue Felix De Vliegher was there. According to their own blog over 200 persons attended this year's event that had several short tech-tracks and 3 key notes.

I first attended the "Battle Flash vs AJAX" between Peter Elst and Peter-Paul Koch and although it wasn't really a battle, it became clear that there's much to say about RIA's in general.
You can find the presentation on slideshare (where else ?).

After the break FeWeb chairman Marc Mestdagh announced the planning for 2009, followed by handing out awards to the FeWeb Quality Label winnars (Webdoos, 2MPact and Media Mates).

Wim Roggeman of the Belgian Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) talked about copyrights and the new social infrastructure of the Internet today. Nice to see that he's using the succesful computer gaming industry as a showcase how the music industry should work today.

Final keynote was given by Luc Beirens, chief of police for the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU), where he gave an interesting talk about e-crime today and how cyber criminals use the same networks as we to operate (except they're not as visible). A few interesting facts he mentioned were:

• India has now "cyber soliders"
• There are still many security issues related to input validation and filtering
• Identity theft will become a serious threat
• There's a need for a global jurisdiction to fight off cyber crime
• End users should have some responsibilities as well (ref. driver's license)

Twitter was heavily used during the sessions, making it possible for people who couldn't attend to have an idea what they were missing (#feweb).

Of course the drinks and social event were also a highlight of the evening, talking with so many people and discussing ways to promote PHP in Belgium. Through this post I wish to thank everyone for their input, we will work something out.

Many thanks for the organization of FeWeb Conference 2008 (and the sponsors Combell and bSeen).

FeWeb is an organization for web developers in Belgium that provides information about legal concequences linked to the job as "web developer", interacts with the government and the industry to advocate the role of the industry and issues a quality label for Belgian web development agencies.

Belgacom - Proximus roaming failure

In this day and age people have a tendency to check the internet first before calling tech support, but apparently some big companies don't get that.

I'm in the Netherlands now and since this morning my mobile phone has no service. So I checked the websites of both Proximus (my cellular provider), Belgacom (it's mother company) and Vodafone (it's partner) to see if there's a problem with their network or services. Nothing was mentioned, nor was there any reference that anything was wrong.
So I spend the whole morning calling to tech support of Proximus to figure out why I don't have any service.

First I was kept on hold for about an hour. In my second attempt I could finally was ablte to talk with a tech support agent telling me the whole roaming service was down and all people abroad weren't able to connect to the cellular network.

This was a general system failure that already lasted several hours but the company didn't even bothered to mention this on the website, having it's customers calling tech support from abroad (paying huge international phone call tarifs) just to find there's a problem at the company.

Dear Proximus, put this kind of failures on your homepage ! This saves a lot of stress, and gives your customers the posibility to provide alternatives to contact friends, family or customers.

Update Zend Framework Bughuntday

Now the video is on Google Video, so now you can embed it wherever you want :-)



Thanks to Stefan Koopmanschap for the hint.