ramblings on PHP, SQL, the web, politics, ultimate frisbee and what else is on in my life
[1]  «  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  »  [71]

Taking a breather to sort out my future

So when you are a programmer life is good. You can kind of work from where ever you want (home/office/nature ..), constantly get to work on new and exciting stuff (well if you want that is) and you can choose from an entire planet offering you jobs that by and large pay pretty well. Personally I have been additionally very lucky in having found Liip. Now this sentence sounds a lot like the beginning of a note on my immediate departure from Liip, where I thank them and then state that I needed a new challenge lala. However this blog post isn't about making a decision to leave Liip public. Its about me trying to figure out what I want to do in the future. I am very certain that there is no other web agency on the planet I would rather work for than Liip.
read on (comments 9)

Slides and speaker infos

Last week I attended 3 different conferences: PHP International Conference in Berlin, then Buzzwords also in Berlin and finally Symfony Live in Paris. So I listened to a lot of talks, but also gave my share of presentations with a workshop, 2 talks and a panel for IPC, 2 lightning talks at Buzzwords and then 2 more talks at Symfony Live. One thing I noticed is that I tend to forget to even mention my name, especially since I rarely even have a slide about myself as I create most slide decks for reuse by the community. I kind of expect people to already know my name from the schedule and if they want to know more about me they can check the site or better yet approach to me after the talk. At the other end of the spectrum I noticed most presenters at Buzzwords were spending multiple slides on themselves and their company and past clients. Something I found highly irritating since most talks only had a 20min slot (which imho is a great idea to give more speakers and topics a chance to be show cased). So I did a little twitter poll today about what people want to see in a talk and most said essentially: name + twitter/github handle.
read on (comments 2)

Query parameter handling in Symfony2

So this topic has been going back and forth in my head a lot over the last months: how do we best handle query parameters in Symfony2? Obviously you can already access query parameters today already but it could be easier. Essentially what I want is a way for developers to easily configure what query parameters they expect and what values they expect. This is useful for several things like easier reading and validating of query parameters, self documenting API both for API docs for humans but also for machines. Now thanks to Alexander we have a solution that works. But there is the big question if this is really the right approach. For now ignore the fact that it only works with annotations for now, because that is fixable. But it does point to the question if this shouldn't be integrated into the routing configuration itself by adding query support for our implementation of uri-templates.
read on (comments 0)

State of PHPCR

It feels like every minute a PHP developer somewhere on this planet starts implementing something aching to a CMS from scratch. Some do it because their project is "so big" it that it "obviously needs" a custom solution. Some do it because their project is "so small" it "obviously needs" just a few days of hacking .. to build a custom solution. Let me briefly focus on the later group. Working in a company with less than 10 people building websites for customers a project needs a bit of a CMS to manage those 10 "semi static" pages seems to be the poster child example of this group. The devs whip up a DB table, slap an ORM in front, maybe even use some generator for the admin UI. Done. Later the clients also wants versioning and luckily many ORMs provide some solution for that. Easy. Permissions? Most frameworks provide some ACL system. Child pages? ORM has some tree algorithm supported. Fulltext search? Integrate ElasticSearch. Custom page types? Uhm well by now you have enough sunken costs that you will make that happen somehow too. Some morning you wake up and you have created the next Drupal or Typo3. If you did, then it would be hard to claim that you did it wrong because both are very successful projects. What PHPCR aims to be is to provide you with a short cut for this path. Or in other words there should be a PHPCR implementation that is so easy to use, with so many helpful higher level components in your favorite framework, that it becomes the natural choice for your next CMS needing project.
read on (comments 8)

Doctrine looking for feedback from its old contributors

So Benjamin just went and wrote a license migration tool, which he will hopefully soonish have time to release as OSS itself. So far things are going well. The tool basically reads out the list of authors and then can list up their commits. Here is for example my list of commits. As some users didn't use the same config for all their commits, we might have authors in our system that in the real world map to the same people. Via an admin tool we can manually update the emails. The system can generate a hash for each author and send out notification emails where the author can then approve or disapprove of the change .. or simply reply that we got the wrong email. Works great as can be seen in the projects overview except that some users have not configured an email address properly when they setup git. However the bigger issue are old contributors back in the svn days. While many of these commits technically do not need to be approved since the code is actually no longer found inside Doctrine, it would be still great to get their approval. So if you find yourself or someone you know in the list of authors who have not yet approved, please let us know!
read on (comments 0)
[1]  «  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  »  [71]