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.

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:

As of 01 April 2010, v1.3 of web2project is live.

This release was focused almost entirely on bug fixing and preparation for the coming v2.0 release in June. Since the v1.2.2 release in January:

Late last month, I received some bad news about web2project...

It turns out that web2project was vulnerable to a handful of select Cross Site Scripting (XSS: definition) vulnerabilities. While the attack vector was pretty specific to being an already authenticated user, it had the potential to be a major problem in a poorly configured system.

On the positive side, I say "was" because within 10 days of being notified of the problem - and the same day the vulnerability became public - we had a patched release out the door and available to users. We've spent the past month since encouraging them to upgrade. Of course, we further benefit from the fact that although the vulnerability does affect us, we're not named in the report.

Recently, I realized that despite talking about Karl Fogel's book - "Producing Open Source Software" - numerous times over the past year[1][2][3], I've never written a review of it. So without further ado, here we go.

I originally picked up my copy in mid-2007. It took me a couple months to get to it, but once I did, it rocked my professional world. To be clear, Karl Fogel is an early (founding?) member of the Subversion Version Control System.