Sunday, October 26. 2008
At Ibuildings we are constantly on the lookout for high quality people, who want to get involved in a variety of complex projects (and maybe some simpler ones). Although quality is hard to define, recently we have not just been looking for a long list of skills and experience, but also candidates who have the potential to play with the big boys, people who feel they can, one day, contribute at the highest level.
This has been an interesting exercise, although frustrating, sorting out the wheat from the (sometimes megalomaniac) chaff. The idea is that we are trying to 'spot' people early in their career, who have the right attitude and capacity for learning.
Why am I blogging this? Well, as we are currently a growing business, we need good people NOW. But also, in the longer term, we want to be aware of the good people out there in the community, and to be on mutual radars even if it doesn't look like we need people at that very minute.
It seems that on our 'PHP' projects, good Javascript skills are needed more often than not these days, and some of it is extremely complex and demanding.
Are you one of those 'people with potential' out there? Speak to us, get on our radar, and one day the timing might be right for us both.
Wednesday, September 10. 2008
About this time last year, we had the pleasure of announcing the launch of our UK office. I'm very proud of the team we have built there (we have about 20 very talented people in our London office), but our growth hasn't stopped there.
This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars.
Continue reading "Building a PHP Center of Expertise"
Thursday, August 14. 2008
In raising the question about whether a specific programming language is agile I want to avoid exploring what makes a language agile, or comparing PHP with other languages. The intention here is not to associate PHP to agile as a natural relationship, as much as to try and understand if we can find the ingredients in the PHP world, for creating an agile environment.
Agile in the context of software development is no more than a set of principles and values as they were identified by a group of people (The 17 Agile Manifesto's signatories) who were then developing software in ways that somehow contrasted with the traditional processes. They had introduced into their development, practices which focused on delivering early and often, favoring constant feedback and change, low overhead, reduced ceremony and flat hierarchy.
Continue reading "Is PHP an Agile Programming Language?"
Monday, August 11. 2008
In May, I helped organize the Dutch PHP TestFest in my position as board member of the Dutch PHP User Group. This dutch event, which was sponsored by Ibuildings, was part of the global PHP TestFest initiative, which aims to get a higher test coverage for the PHP language and with that stabilize the language even more - something that will benefit all users of PHP. Back in May, we already deemed our event a big success with 10 attendees, a great presentation by Sebastian Bergmann and a huge number of tests written. But it turns out to be an even bigger success...
Monday, March 31. 2008
Most PHP developers have heard of the CURL extension for PHP or even used it. However it is mostly used in a basic form: to retrieve content from other websites or (RESTful) webservices. Ofcourse PHP itself offers several functions (like fopen or fsockopen) for getting this content, but they are all very basic. It is easy to run into limitations, for example you might want to define the request method or set another user agent (if you're building a webspider). This is where the curl extension kicks in. It is a separate library that has to be compiled with PHP in order to use it. The Curl extension has many functions and options which offer the developer more flexibility than the standard PHP functions.
Saturday, March 15. 2008
ATK contains lots of hidden gems. Most of them are hidden because they are undocumented or because they are only documented in the API docs (which nobody seems to read...). In the past few years we've tried to improve the documentation for ATK. We've created a Wiki with lots of how-to's, the "Pizza Guides", a demo application and improved the API documentation. However there are still some features of ATK nobody seems to know about.
In this second iteration of the " ATK's hidden gems" series we will look at a largely unknown feature of ATK's record actions.
Monday, March 3. 2008
A few days ago I was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting. One of the talks there, was about PHP 6 and the unicode support it promised by Andrei Zmievski. I have long been waiting for unicode support in PHP because of some projects in the past where I discovered the limitations we currently have to work around. So I was coming into the talk expecting that it could now speak unicode natively.
Thursday, February 14. 2008
I recently read a good quote by Larry Wall (creator of Perl) saying "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.".
The truth is: writing flexible, robust, elegant and readable/debuggable code is really really really really hard, especially in a language as 'free' as PHP is.
But as with all things, practice (and constant improvement) makes perfect and over the years I've picked up a lot of 'rules of thumb' that I believe make my code just a little bit 'better'.
These last couple of months I've been documenting some of them and today I'd like to share some of the more interesting ones.
Continue reading "7 Simple PHP Best Practices"
Thursday, February 7. 2008
Recently 'A List Apart' posted an article about the new X-UA-Compatible switch that Microsoft will be implementing in Internet Explorer 8.
In short, you can target versions of the IE renderer with the switch; you can say: I want this page to be rendered like IE7 would render it and then IE8 (and IE9 and IE10 presumably) would render it similarly to IE7.
Now this provoked a lot of reactions, and it got me thinking about one of the most painful subjects among developers (PHP and in general): backward compatibility.
Monday, December 31. 2007
On my personal blog I have written an article about how 2007 was a year where PHP strengthened its position in the business world.
Being a PHP service company, this naturally had an impact on Ibuildings. Our team of PHP professionals grew significantly, and we even expanded our horizon into other countries, starting with the UK. We welcomed many new customers. Some that were already using PHP, some that have only just embraced PHP as a development language.
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