If you are interested in the code, it is hosted on GitHub for download and distribution.  Special thanks for everyone coming out tonight to hear my talk.  If you guys have questions, please let me know.

• Validators
• Filtering Input
• Zend_Form
• RSS Feeds
• Delpoying an API with ZF
• Zend_Date
• Zend_Config
• Zend_Log
• Zend_Mail
• Zend_Registry

This is also the first (of hopefully many) PHP meetups at NC State.  The group typically meets in Carrboro which is a good ways from where I live, so this is part of an effort to get more meetups in Raleigh.  If you are a PHP person in the Triangle, I'd like to encourage you to get involved in the community and come to the meetup.  You can RSVP from meetup.com.

I'm looking forward to being able to present, especially about something that I really love.  Let's hope we have a big crowd that continues to come back and contribute to the group.

We have done code reviews in the past, but they were very informal and their effectiveness could be debated.  There were a few problems with them, mainly:

1. We weren't entire sure how to do one properly
2. They degraded to an attack on the developer, not the code
3. They weren't integrated as part of the process
4. We didn't have enough people looking at the code

Now I am not saying we solved all of these problems, but we started moving in the right direction.  At TEK-X, I had gone to a session by Arne Blankerts and Sebastian Bergmann about code reviews that was extremely helpful.  I always felt like code reviews are for large teams, but Sebastian and Arne gave me some tips about how to implement them in our small team.  It seems for us, the more formal code review process where people have defined roles would not work so well.  What we did instead was to have our developers use the projector in our office to "present" their code.  Our roles were loosely defined as a presenter, a note taker, and two developers to critique the code.

This approach worked really well!  We closed our office door, put most of our computers to sleep, and concentrated on the task at hand.  Fewer distractions led to more focus and a better session.  We were able to make it through a good bit of code, finding all sorts of stuff that could be improved.

One of the major mistakes we had made in the past was letting the criticism get off the code and onto the coder.  To try to curb that a bit, we all had a chat beforehand to set forth some guidelines.  As the senior developer, I led with the idea that when we are critical of a piece of code, we're talking just about the code and not about the developer.  The whole purpose of doing these code reviews is to make everyone better at development, not to call anyone out or to make someone feel bad.  I feel like it takes a certain amount of maturity for developers to take criticism of their code and not take it personally, and my guys didn't disappoint.  Us senior developers also made a conscience effort to be cordial when doing our criticism and I think it paid off.  Everyone participated and still liked each other in the end

After the session was over, I asked the guys what they thought and they loved the feedback.  They definitely wanted to do code reviews more often, so we decided that every Tuesday afternoon we would reserve for code reviews.  I think this will help us stick with it and make it part of our process.

If you have never done a code review in your team, I'd suggest giving them a try.  It is a great way to give feedback to your developers, and you may learn something while you are at it.

It went better than I expected. There was a lot of good discussion during my slides, which I love. Lots of presenters don’t like to be interrupted, but I always like to see my talks as discussions rather than lectures. Some good questions and points were raised, and I guess you could say I spouted off a few good lines that got tweeted and re-tweeted a bunch (I swear I didn’t plan any of them).

Stuff like that cracks me up.  I hope everyone enjoyed it cause I sure enjoyed giving it.

I got good feedback after the talk and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I thanked Cal Evans, Keith Casey and Marco Tabini for giving me the opportunity to give a talk and believing that I could do it. That means a whole lot to me...thanks guys!

The next session I went to was Lorna Jane Mitchell’s talk about open sourcing your career. She talked about how her efforts in the open source community outside of her job had benefited her career path. She started out doing the things that I have been doing over the past few years. Going to conferences, connecting in with projects, contributing where she could, meeting people. I already feel like that is making a difference in my career, and I actually really like all of that stuff to, so it was a good talk.

The last talk of the day was a panel session of the state of the PHP Community. I only got to stay for about half of it because I had to pack, but there was a bunch of good info there for people trying to start user groups. One of the things I am going to take from this conference is that I need to make a better effort to encourage the PHPers in Raleigh to unite a little better. I have plans...bwahahah!

So that’s it for tekx! The conference was great, and catching up with people is always a good thing. I learned a lot and am a bit recharged. Thanks to all the sponsors and organizers for a great conference. Hope I see you guys next year!

The rest of the days talks went like this:

• I checked out Matthew Turland’s talk on the new SPL Features in PHP 5.3.  Turns out, PHP is getting all grown up with real live data structures like linked lists and heaps.  Neato for the Computer Science geek that dwells within me.
• Next was Nate Abele and Joël Perras’s talk about Lithium.  Joël and I talked a bit about Lithium earlier in the conference, and it sounded neat.  They skated the line of sarcasm with lines like “All Frameworks Suck” a little too much, and I honestly think their message got lost.  I still wanna check it out, but the presentation would not have sold me on it had it not been for talking with Joël offline.
• Next was Measuring Your Code, again with Nate Abele.  It was a pretty interesting talk about gathering metrics about your code, but it wasn’t a whole lot of new info for me.

After these sessions, I was feeling kinda drained so I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Hack Track hacking on Zend Framework.  Today and tomorrow are bug hunt days, so I figured I would give a shot at fixing some bugs.  In actuality, the network was so darn slow that I didn’t get a chance to actually fix anything, but I did download and install lithium and got a project stood up with it and Mongo DB very quickly.

During the Hack Track, I had some good conversation with a bunch of folks about PHP, community, contributing to open source, and all sorts of stuff.  There are some really awesome people that come to these conferences and they are always willing to help out.  Good times.

Dinner was on our own, so I made the trek to PF Changs, which is becoming a tradition any time I go to a conference.  After dinner, Microsoft sponsored a gaming night where “Jason and the Thundercats” made our world debut on the Rock Band stage.  “American Woman” never sounded so sweet.

I didn’t stay at the part long as I wanted to rehearse and tweak my slides for my presentation that I had to give the next day.  I had to go downstairs because the internet in my room sucked, which led to me catching up with some more folks and having more good conversation over a beer.  I freakin love this conference...

Here is the scenario.  We have to maintain a bunch of production web applications, most of which use Zend Framework.  When we have created a new version of the application, we need to deploy it to production in as simple of a way as possible.  We have automated the file version of this by using Phing to export the tag out of SVN, copy old config files, set write permissions in the correct place, etc.  However, the database manipulation has happened manually and we are looking for strategies on how to automate this.

We came up with an idea to write a custom migration library which will execute php and sql files, but it seems like a problem that has to be solved better by someone else.  Anyone have any tips?  Anecdotes?  Strategies?  Anything to help us get going in the right direction would be much appreciated.  I'd even buy someone a beer or two

Implementing software development “best practices” can be a challenging feat, especially if you are in a very small team of developers. Little to no budget, stress to just “get something out”, and lack of understanding from management of what you really do means you have to make sacrifices, right? This talk will give you some insight on accomplishing your goals of being a top-rated development shop, even if you are an army of one. From justifying those best practices to utilizing free services to hiring additional help, this talk will run the gamut of running a software development shop at a small scale.

Speaking at a conference is a great responsibility and honor, but then I took at look at who the other speakers are and I was immediately humbled.  So many of the other speakers are the movers and shakers in the PHP community.  Hell, some of them actually helped write PHP.  As soon as I saw the speaker list, I instantly got nervous.  But a few reassuring words from my friend Keith Casey helped.  I am just thankful that people like Keith and the rest of the TEK·X organizers are willing to give me a shot to share what I have learned about working with PHP in a resource starved environment.

So if you are a PHP pro and want to get involved with a great community, consider coming to TEK·X in May.  Knowing (of) most of the speakers, and meeting most all of them at one time or another, I can GUARANTEE that you are going to get your moneys worth.

While I don't like resolutions, I do find that with a new year, it is good to reflect back on the previous one and evaluate where you are and what you want to accomplish in the new one.  In an effort to keep myself honest, I figured I would record my goals for the new year here, in no particular order.

Grow My Business

2009 was an interesting year for AmberCube.  We had a few clients, made a little money (enough to buy Garrison and I new computers), and joined some new ventures.  The economy certainly affected our profitability, but I believe our focus wasn't as strong as I wanted it to be.  My hope for the new year is that we can increase our client base and grow the business.  Hopefully that means additional income too.

Advance Professionally

I accomplished a good bit at NC State in 2009.  I lead the initiative to get the NC State Mobile Web up and going, helped a lot with the social media identity of the university, and started managing some part-time employees.  I got more involved with the tech and social media communities in the Raleigh-Durham area, participated in BarCampRDU, and met a lot of great people.  While all that is great, it's not enough for me.  I'd like to establish myself more at the University and get to a level where I can feel like I make an impact.  I'm not sure I can do that in my current position, but that doesn't keep me from trying.  I already know that 2010 will bring an increased responsibility for me as I will be participating on the Campus Communication Committee, focusing on web and social media communications.  And we are working on some really exciting projects for the mobile web presence.  2010 will certainly be busy, but my goal is to make it pay off professionally.

Travel More

Erin and I have talked about it a lot, but this year is the year.  We have gone a few places since we got married (San Francisco, Memphis, Jamaica for our Honeymoon), but we have always wanted to go bigger.  Our plan is to try to make it to Europe this year.  I really want to go to Italy and Paris, so we are going to make it happen.  We have been saving up money for 2+ years to go, so this is the year we are going to do it.  Planning has already started   Oh yeah, and on the back of traveling, I am planning on buying a Digital SLR camera before making any big trips.  That means I'll need to learn how to use the thing properly too.

Lose some bad habits

This is the obligatory "I want to eat out less, work out more, be healthier" one, but I need to add it to the list.  We got into a bad habit of eating out several times a week, which is not only expensive, but un-healthy too.  I worked really hard a few years ago to lose a lot of weight, and I don't want all that hard work to go to waste.  To help me, I found a great website/iPhone app to help me called dailyburn.  It will help me track my food and workouts, set goals for myself, and accomplish what I want to in 2010.

Explore more

Erin and I love to try new things, so 2010 will hopefully be a year to explore new things.  Food, wine, beer, places, things to do.  I want us to live while the living is good.  Part of this is travel, but a lot of it has to do with what we typically do on the weekends.  Lately, it has been sitting around in front of a computer, which is pretty lame.  I hope the new year provides us with a kick in the butt to get out, experience all the great things Raleigh has to offer, and spend more quality time together.

Get more involved with the PHP Community

Warning...Geek speak to follow!  I really love the PHP community.  I swear, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread for a developer like me who has to operate on no budget and a tiny staff.  I have recently joined the Zend Framework project, finally signing my contributor license agreement!  That means I can start helping with documentation and the monthly bug fixes.  I have also been invited to speak at TEK-X in Chicago in May.  I am really excited about the opportunity to speak at my first professional PHP conference as an on-the-agenda speaker.  I have done un-conference sessions before, but this is the first for-real one.  I am nervous and excited, all at the same time.  There are a few more conferences that I will be submitting papers to as well, so we'll see where that takes me...

I think that is enough stuff for the new year.  Hope everyone has a wonderful, productive and exciting 2010.