In the past couple months, I've chatted quite a bit with different startup founders. Most were non-technical people looking for a developer to expand what they have (rare) or build it from the ground up (the vast majority). In all but a few cases, something rubbed me wrong about the conversations...

In a few cases, they're using equity-only to recruit. That's a huge red flag, but not a deal breaker. In a few cases, the technical priorities are solid and clearly defined. That's a huge plus but doesn't guarantee anything. A couple have offices, most don't. The lead people vary by demographics, experience, industry, etc, etc. It wasn't until I read Ellen Beldner's post titled "Should you take a pay cut to work at a startup?" when it clicked:

As a sequel to last year's T'was the Night Before Christmas:

Cell phones ring
are you listening
on the web
something's missing
No server in sight
no one's sleeping tonight
working in a startup wonderland.

As of 19 December 2010, web2project v2.2 is officially live! You can download it from SourceForge now.

While in many releases we might focus on cleanup or functionality or developer aspects or similar, this one is a mishmash of a bunch of useful updates on numerous fronts. This isn't all of the updates but a bunch of the important ones:

For the Project Managers:

This post was lifted wholesale from Cal Evans's post from DevZone. I think he summed it up well and I had nothing to add.

Admittedly, I only knew Richard in passing. We'd met at a couple conferences and he was at CodeWorks last month. I wish I'd gotten to know him a little bit better.

Approximately 10 days ago, I finished the 2010 CodeWorks Tour. This time around with 4 speakers hitting 5 cities, it was smaller, more compact, and generally a litte more intimate of an experience. Due to the odd nature of this one, I'm going to skip my usual "Good, Bad, Ugly" conference review format and go straight to some highs & lows.

Venues:

Since most of our attendees were local to each venue, we opted out of standard hotels. They're only cost-effective if you have 100+ people staying there. Instead, we looked at universities and theaters. In Seattle and Orlando, we were at the Northwest Film Forum and the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre respectively. Both we set up for a close, intimate setup where we could actually see everyone. It's fun to speak when most of the audience is within 50 feet and you don't need a microphone. In Austin and Baltimore, we were at St Edwards Ragsdale Center and Johns Hopkins' Charles Commons respectively. Both were standard university setups which meant they were great on tech but a little impersonal and seemed distant at times.

This was my sixth ZendCon and I've lost count of how many conferences overall. Regardless, this is one of the unique conferences in the PHP community as it's a blend of business and Open Source. Sometimes that works beautifully, sometimes not so much..

The Good

First, the content was excellent. In past years, I've always heard of a few oddbad "what was he thinking" sessions. This time, they either weren't there or didn't cause a ripple. Overall, the content was solid, interesting, and well-supported. A couple people - Stefan Priebsch and Elizabeth Naramore - stood out as also having an engaged audience that actively participated. If you're looking for slides or information, check out ZendCon 2010 on Joind.in for all the details.