Over a year and a half ago, I caught one of Travis Swicegood's sessions on "Getting Git." At the time, I didn't but it had interesting implications, so I bought his book "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward a year and I found myself buried under web2project patches. At the time, all of them had to go through a few of us to make it into the core Sourceforge repository and the diffs started piling up. Needing a new approach where I could handle patches faster and easier, I decided to spend some time and actually explore Git.

It's been a week since tekX completed and there are a number of other tekX writeups to read but I thought I'd share one last one from a different point of view. To add some context, I'm not the guy that signs the contracts, approves the expenses, schedules the sessions, arranges the speakers, or anything useful. Due to other project commitments, I basically served as backup for some of those things and then as social chair for the evening events.

First off, I'm proud of our first time tekX speakers. Easily half of the speakers had never spoken at a tek before, off the top of my head that includes - Bill Karwin, David Strauss, Jason Austin, Josh Holmes, Kanwalijeet Singla, Kristina Chodorow, Matt Schmidt, Matt Turland, Ryan Stewart, Sumit Chawla, and myself. Since tek is the Community Conference and it tends to be incredibly technical, it takes a different mindset than many of the other conferences. Even better, a few of those people were first or second time conference speakers period.

During my Live Coding sessions at TEK·X* last week, one of the questions that came up repeatedly was:

Events... what are these Event things and why does Flex work like that?

When you initially dive into the world of Flex development**, most PHP'ers will quickly notice something weird. We're out of the world of Request/Response that we know and understand and into an odd world of Events, Listeners, and Publishers/Subscribers where things just don't play well together.

I'm all for stealing borrowing good ideas (not code) from other projects where it can be applicable. And since one of the major areas of complaints in Open Source is installation and upgrades, a recent article titled "One big thing Ubuntu can teach Microsoft, Apple, and all CTOs" from Tech Republic really struck me:

What Canonical does really well is to methodically produce incremental upgrades to its OS. It is transparent about its goals and plans, and it releases its software on schedule. In fact, this incremental approach is Ubuntu’s most potent competitive weapon against rivals Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

I've been an Ubuntu user on the desktop almost exclusively for three years now. And honestly, beyond a few issues with Major upgrades, the incremental Minor updates have been quick and painless. I still don't do them in the week before a major presentation or conference, but that's my own timidity. ;)

This is incredibly late since tek·X starts in four days, but it's definitely worth noting here. After a headed battle of Rock-Paper-Scissors against Cal Evans and Marco Tabini, I finally lost. While I thought we were deciding who was going to pay for dinner, it turns out the stakes were a bit lot higher.

It turns out that I will be Live Coding for two back to back sessions at tek.

You don't believe me? Well, here's the description:

A Project Importer update is available for web2project from the downloads page.

Version 4.0 marks a major update in the Project Importer module. While many changes are minor, there are some significant updates to performance and general reliability:

Release Notes: