On Constructive Criticism

Last week at php|tek 2009, there were numerous sessions on improving your development practices.  There were some focused on better SVN usage, some offering better Object Oriented design practices, some on better Linux-fu, but none of them generated as much discussion – and angst – as “PHP Code Review” (slides here).  Here's the description: In […]


web2project Status Update: Ready?

It’s been a few weeks since the last update – an aggressive travel schedule interrupted writing – but we haven’t been stationary. Since the last web2project update, we’ve had another handful of bugs submitted.  Some were trivial and were closed in a matter of minutes.  Others were complicated and we fought with them for hours.  […]


Product Roadmaps: Pick and Choose

In case you haven't been following along, I tend to talk quite a bit about web2project and its upcoming release.  At this point, the release is so close that a number of questions have popped up: What features does it have?  What features doesn't it have?  Where are these features found, defined, and refined?  How […]


ZendCon 2009 Call For Papers

<trumpet blast /> Earlier this week my friend and collaborateur Eli White announced the ZendCon 2009 Call for Papers (dislaimers below).  While ZendCon has gotten a little “enterprise-y” in the past with a heavy presence from IBM, Oracle, and similar companies, it looks like they're taking a different angle this year: We are expanding this […]


You might be a developer…

Since I started my career in software development, I've read and reviewed code in a variety of languages.  In each of them, I believe I've learned a few things.  I haven't always learned what to do, sometimes it's been an informative overview of what not to do.  Regardless, I thought it'd be worth sharing my […]


The First Rule for Software Development

Recently I taught a class of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed PHP’ers just getting their start in the world.  They haven’t done their first production application and we were working in the “safe” confines of a classroom, but there was one concept that I pounded into their heads: Don’t Trust the Users It may sound harsh but: It’s […]