Getting ready to Rockstar

Veröffentlicht am 17. September 2009 (vor 973 Tagen)

To be honest, I have always wanted to be a rockstar. Why else would I pick up my brother’s electric guitar and try to teach myself how to play when I was sixteen or seventeen?

"Don Marco" Tabini has finally made it possible. On Sunday, I will leave for San Francisco to do a 14 days-7 cities tour of the United States. Admittedly, I have switched sides at some point between being sixteen and today, so I will probably not bring my electric guitar, but my laptop, and the best Advanced OOP and Design Patterns workshop I have ever done. At least, I have more images in my slides these days, presumably like everybody else who has read Presentation Zen.

In the workshop, I will present some advanced OOP features of PHP, and how to use them effectively. I usually bring more material to workshops than we will have time for, so the audience can determine the focus of the workshop. I can also talk a bit about new OOP features in PHP 5.3, for example, if there is interest. In any case, I will bring lots of code examples, especially for the design patterns we are going to cover.

In addition, I will do a half-day code review session together with Arne and Sebastian, my thePHP.cc-Partners. Doing these code reviews is great fun, and we get really good feedback on them from the audiences. Our focus is not to bash on other people’s work, but to show code examples from various open source projects that we think leave some room for improvement. We will then discuss with the audience why and how the code should be modified.

Attending a code review workshop has multiple benefits for the attendees. First of all, you will leave with more confidence about your own programming skills, because you realize that others put on their pants one leg at a time as well.

Second, you gather a lot of behind-the-scenes information about PHP and how PHP works. Wait until you see how Magento creatively uses object destructors, and why they are lucky that their code does not work.

And last but not least, we will pass around a USB stick, so you can have a piece of your own code reviewed - anonymously, if you want.

Unfortunately, our alternating workshop day / travel day schedule will not leave us much room for hanging out with local PHP communities or user groups, but I hope to see you guys show up at the conference and workshop days. After all, the tickets are available at a bargain price, and you don’t have to travel somewhere else.

Still, there is a load of things we are planning to do, besides giving the workshops. Sebastian and I hope to be able to spend some time working on or QA book. The first chapter planning for that book was done in a Starbucks in Atlanta, so it seems appropriate to continue working on the book while traveling the U.S.A.

Another thing I have planned might turn out to be a disaster. I just don’t know. But since we have started our company, we have been searching for a free (or at least reasonably priced) CRM solution. We do meet a lot of people at conferences and when we do open trainings, so it’s rather important for us to keep track about who talked to whom, and about what. This comes in very handy if you send a proposal to some company and they ask you to get back to them in a couple of months. So basically we need some kind of address management (though we are not even sure that we want to implement this, we might just use Thunderbird to manage all the addresses). What we do need, though, is a history of e-mails and other contacts we had, and some way of creating tasks for the future, assigning them to somebody, and have the software remind us when we fail to complete the tasks.

Since I like to set ambitious goals for myself, I have agreed with Arne to do a CRM hackathon while we are at Code Works. I’ll probably write a PHP backend, while Arne does a XUL frontend. We want to keep things as simple as possible, so I think we have a fair chance of having some basic contact/task management software when we arrive back home from New York City. Let’s see where we end up, and whether the result will deserve to be called CRM. I’ll keep you posted.

I hope to see all of you at CodeWorks 09, the touring PHP conference. We’ve got some premium content to share, and we are eager to discuss all aspects professional PHP development with you, so make sure you stop by and say hello.

Tags: PHP, CodeWorks09, OOP, Training, Workshop, Design Patterns, Arne Blankerts, Sebastian Bergmann, Starbucks, Atlanta, thePHP.cc, Magento, QA Book, CRM, XUL, U.S.A., New York

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