Posts by: dpcradio

• DPC Radio: Keynote - The Art of the User Experience: making beautiful, delightful, fun things April 27, 2012

  Aral Balkan

  We are the makers of the new everyday things. We design and develop the virtual pens, telephones, newspapers, calendars, and door-handles that people interact with every single day. We are the virtual architects and the products that we design and develop have the power to determine whether people have a good day or a bad day.

  In this session, Aral Balkan will outline the important role that user experience design plays in the making of virtual products and inspire you to see that it is your job – regardless of whether you make web sites, mobile apps, intranet systems, or ticket machines – to make this new world that we are crafting together not only usable and accessible but beautiful, fun, inspiring, pleasurable, delightful, and – dare I say – magical.

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• DPC Radio: TDD and Getting Paid April 10, 2012

  Rowan Merewood

  Test-driven development is generally regarded as a good move: it should result in simple decoupled design, your tests tend to cover behaviour not methods, and far fewer bugs. However, just getting unit tests in on a real, commercial project is hard - switching to TDD is even harder. Defining concrete answers to a problem is hard and can be difficult to integrate into Often you can start a project with good intentions and coverage, then the deadline looms and the tests go out then the hacks come in. So, instead of beating ourselves up about not being perfect let's look at an interactive approach to adopting TDD principles. We'll look at tactics for selling TDD to your client, boss and colleagues. This talk will also cover methods for making TDD easier for you by showing you what tools you can use to integrate it into your development environment. In the project itself, we'll examine how we can make small but permanent steps towards full TDD, without losing that progress when deadlines hit. We'll also cover a few methods for learning on your own time and how the whole process can actually be made quite enjoyable.

  You can find Rowan's slides on slideshare.

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• DPC Radio: Clean PHP March 22, 2012

  Sebastian Bergmann

  Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. In this session you will learn how you can offset your technical debt with clean code that is readable and testable as well as reusable.

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• DPC Radio: Implementing OAuth February 8, 2012

  Lorna Jane Mitchell

  With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

  You can find Lorna's slides at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/oauth-7990565

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• DPC Radio: Advanced OO Patterns January 17, 2012

  Tobias Schlitt

  You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.

  You can find Toby's slides under "Advanced OOP Patterns" here: http://qafoo.com/presentations.html

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• DPC Radio: Profiling PHP Applications December 14, 2011

  Derick Rethans

  The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues. Before you can optimise, you need to find out if your codeis actually slow; then you need to *understand* the code; and *then* you need to find out where you can optimise it. This talk introduces tools and concepts to optimise the optimisation of your PHP applications.

  You can find Derick's talk slides over on his site [PDF]

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• DPC Radio: Distributed Couch Apps - Embracing eventual consistency November 21, 2011

  Kore Nordmann

  CouchDB is a prominent representative of the NoSQL movement. Using its integrated web server and eventual consistent replication you can not only distribute data, but also full application code. This even works for clients which are not always connected to the internet, like e.g. mobile devices. This session gives you an insight Couch apps, their beauty and pitfalls.

  You can find Kore's slides over on http://talks.qafoo.com/

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• DPC Radio: Developing and Deploying High Performance PHP Applications November 10, 2011

  Christopher Jones

  This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment.

  The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database. Techniques include connection pooling, application monitoring, automatic data privacy for PHP application users, online application upgrades, caching for performance, and how to suspend and resume database transactions to effectively build stateful web applications.

  You can find Chris' slides on oracle's technetwork

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• DPC Radio: Searching with Solr - Why, When, and How October 5, 2011

  Paul Matthews

  With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.

  Edit: Paul's slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/paulmatthews86/search-with-solr

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• DPC Radio: Let's take over the world with Zend Framework September 21, 2011

  Today's episode comes from one of our own Ibuildings employees, covering Zend Framework.

  Martin de Keijzer

  Many people use Zend Framework for it's MVC implementation, but it has a lot of hidden gems. Internationalization (i18n) is one of them. We will look how you can create an application that will have the right languages, currencies, dates and times all based on the location of the visiting user. This session will take away a lot of headaches in international projects and will improve the quality in overall.

  Edit: You can find Martin's slides on slideshare

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• DPC Radio: Keynote - First Class APIs September 13, 2011

  This year's DPCRadio returns with one of the keynotes from this year's event as our first episode.

  Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

  APIs are commonly an afterthought, like a hot tub awkwardly attached to a house — a shoehorned approach that produces a suboptimal app with scarce support that lacks documentation. In effect, APIs are the ugly stepchild of the Web.

  This is a sad reality that we are faced with, because many companies make their living consuming third-party APIs and mixing in their own data to create amazing and interesting mashups. In the initial phases of development, there is rarely enough money to develop the app and its API. By the time there’s both demand and money, it can be hard to fit an API on top of the architecture in such a way that the whole thing won’t fall over. APIs should be first class citizens of the Web. Inconceivable? Possimpible? Not at all!

  In this talk we will dive deeper into why APIs are an afterthought, how we can change that. We will also touch on how that can benefit your product down the line in terms of resource savings and infrastructure efficiency, as well as the impact it will have on your infrastructure.

  This talk is inspired by my phpadvent article.

  (You can find Helgi's slides over on Slideshare)

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• DPCRadio: Technical Writing April 28, 2011

  Elizabeth Naramore

  If you've had an idea for writing a blog post or article, but you're not sure where to start, this talk is for you! Maybe you've had difficulty effectively documenting your code, or communicating your ideas to non-techies. This talk will help you, too! In this fun and informative session, we'll discuss the basics of writing and clear communication through the written word. We'll also talk about strategies for keeping your writing interesting and informative at the same time. Finally, we'll discuss resources for improving your writing skills in the future.

  This session definitely loses something if you can't see Elizabeth's slides, so download them and follow along

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• DPCRadio: Real World Dependency Injection April 12, 2011

  Stephan Hochdoerfer

  The Dependency Injection (DI) pattern is getting more and more attention in the PHP world due to it's code simplification effects. It focuses on the complete separation of object instantiation and dependency tracking from the business logic resulting in a loosely coupled system. In addition to that the resulting code is a lot easier to test since the classes are no longer responsible for instantiating their own dependencies. This session will introduce the basics of the DI pattern to the audience in addition to share real world experience of DI in several customer projects in the last four years.

  You can also download Stephan's slides to accompany this podcast

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• DPCRadio: Embracing Constraints With CouchDB March 23, 2011

  David Zuelke

  There has been a lot of buzz lately about the NoSQL movement in general and CouchDB in particular. For people who are used to relational databases, a lot of CouchDB's limitations look like severe disadvantages; these constraints however can also be great opportunities. This talk will give an overview of CouchDB and then focus on embracing the system's constraints to build better products.

  You can find David's slides over on slideshare

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• DPCRadio: The Cake Is A Lie March 15, 2011

  Sebastian Bergmann

  Even if you have not played the game Portal" you might have come across the phrase "The cake is a lie". According to the Urban Dictionary, it roughly translates to "your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator".

  Scaffolding, the meta-programming method of building software applications, promises easier development and a faster time-to-market. But the "code generation bliss" can lead to problems later on, for instance with regard to maintainability and scalability. This sessions takes a skeptical look at frameworks such as CakePHP and symfony."

  You can find the slides from Sebastian's session here

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• DPCRadio: Database version control without pain March 1, 2011

  Speaker:Harrie Verveer

  We've all read the textbooks and are using version control systems for our code, but our databases are left out in the cold. Every team has their own workaround, ranging from patch files to SQL snippets in the bugtracker, but none is really robust. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet, but there are several tools and best practices that can help you to make your life easier. This talk shows several approaches that can help you to overcome this problem and to control database structure changes in a more sophisticated way.

  You can find Harrie's slides over on slideshare, and he also wrote about this topic for techportal recently.

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• Video Interview: Meet The Authors February 1, 2011

  Here's a video from the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, where we pulled together some of the published technical authors at the event (many of them speakers) and asked them a few questions about books, writing, and getting published. Here's what they had to say ...

  DPC10: Meet The Authors from Ibuildings on Vimeo.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• DPCRadio: Working with Zend_Form January 26, 2011

  Rob Allen

  Zend_Form is a powerful component than can simplify form handling within your web application. Find out in this session how to make Zend_Form render and validate your form elements and ease the pain of forms on web pages.

  We will look at configuration, data filters & validation and error handling. One particularly tricky area is the use of the decorator pattern to control the generated HTML when rendering the form. This session will therefore also take a detailed look at this especially powerful functionality and show how to ensure that your forms are rendered as desired.

  Slides can be found here

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• Video Interview: Kevlin Henney January 6, 2011

  To kick off 2011 here's an interview with our inspirational keynote speaker Kevlin Henney - talking about development and how we can keep bettering ourselves!

  Video Interview: Kevlin Henney from Ibuildings on Vimeo.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• DPCRadio: Under PHP’s hood December 21, 2010

  Johannes Schlüter

  PHP developers usually don't have to care about the inner workings of PHP and the Zend Engine as it simply works. This presentation will present some of the inner workings, like teaching the truth about references. Additionally it will present basics of PHP's opcode, the internal representation of a script, and it's consequences for opcode caching, autoloading and other related issues.

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• Video Interview: Lorna Mitchell December 14, 2010

  With the Call for Papers open and the for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011, it seems like a good time to bring in this interview from last year's host, Lorna Mitchell. Watch this short video for her impressions of the overall event, and some top tips for getting your talks accepted this year!

  Video Interview: Lorna Jane Mitchell from Ibuildings on Vimeo.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• DPCRadio: The Art of Scalability November 23, 2010

  Lorenzo Alberton

  Having invested time and energy into your application,
  nothing could be more exciting than seeing it gain popularity, and seeing your user base grow. However the success of your application could also turn into your worst nightmare! What if the site cannot cope with the load and collapses under its own weight?

  The ability to grow (and shrink) according to the needs and the available resources is an essential part of designing applications. In this talk we'll cover the fundamental elements of scalability, including aspects involving people, processes and technology. With sound and proven principles and some advice on how to shape your organisation, set the right processes and design your application, this session is a must-see for developers and technical leads alike.

   

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• DPCRadio: Stress-free deployment November 9, 2010

  Rob Allen

  This talk will concentrate on the various strategies you can use to ensure that developing and releasing new features to a live website is stress-free. Firstly we will look at how organising your source code into branches can provide confidence and allow for features to go-live in any order. We will the consider the mechanics of deploying a new version of the website to the server, ensuring that we can repeat the process the same way every time. Finally we will look at how to roll back a deployment easily and quickly when something goes wrong.

  The slides are over on Rob's site if you want to follow along with the talk.

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• DPCRadio: Plant Pyrus in your system - A guide to a plugin system. October 27, 2010

  Helgi Thormar Thobjoernsson

  Anyone that has written a Content Management System or a blog system, has quickly realised that people will want to extend the functionality of the application and thus the developer has to embark on a journey to write a plugin system with everything that comes with that.

  One of the biggest parts of any plugin system is the part that deals with discovery, installation, upgrading, dependency handling, infrastructure and other equally boring things. An essential part of any plugin system yet everyone dreads writing it, and few actually take on the task of writing it.

  With Pyrus (the new PEAR installer) these tasks will not only be easy to do but also a joy. By embedding Pyrus in your application with its lavish new APIs you can use a tried and tested solution that hundred of thousands of people use every day on their command line, but you will be able to provide it right IN your tool, in your admin area, properly integrated with the layout and dictating the flow of the processes so it fits the ideologies of your software. Learn how to provide your users with fantastic experience, at the low price of using in the Pyrus installer in your application instead of trying to write your own solution.

  Update: The slides for this talk are also available

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• DPCRadio: Advanced Git October 12, 2010

  David Soria Parra

  Besides OpenSource projects like the Linux Kernel, OpenJDK or Perl, companies increasingly use distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial. Their unique features makes new and modern work-flows possible, which are particularly useful in agil development.

  The talk gives a introduction to the advanced features of Git and the fundamental concepts of modern distributed version control systems.

  The slides are also available

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