After my great experience last year I was eager to attend the second edition of WhiskyWeb and it has to be said that the organisers (in random order, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas, Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Paul Dragoonis and Ben Longden) didn't let me down. The atmosphere was incredible and once again they managed to create something really special. (more...)
Whisky Web is a brand new, fresh conference and the 2012 edition was the inaugural event, with hopefully many more to follow. This event has some familiar names from the PHP community behind it, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas and his helpers Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis.
The opening keynote from Josh Holmes was about learning how to fail, because everyone has to fail, not once but many times, because it's only by failing that we learn. So please never be afraid to make mistakes and never be afraid to ask for help. That's a great way to grow up personally and professionally in this industry.
In contrast, David Zuelke's closing keynote was deeply technical. He talked about RESTful web services and how to implement them. What I liked was the fact that in contrast to the current trend, where it seems JSON is the only answer to data transfer across web services and systems, David pushed heavily towards XML and the fact that XML is more descriptive and comprehensive than a JSON data structure. He made the important point that while XML can easily represent a JSON set of data, the opposite is not necessarily true.
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This is the second part of our PHPNW11 conference review. Check out the previous part here.
The conference started on Friday with its first ever tutorial day. I attended the "Security" tutorial by Arne Blankerts as it's very relevant for the project I'm working on at the moment. The talk was very enjoyable, especially because for the first time someone put emphasis not only on the software security aspect, but also on the hardware and the physical access control policy. You can put all your efforts and apply all the best practices to make your software secure, but everything can vanish in a moment if anyone can access your data centre without restrictions. My colleague Marco Lopes has reviewed this tutorial in more detail in his PHPNW11 report.
The second tutorial I attended was "Maintainable Applications in PHP Using Components" by Stuart Herbert. It was his first time delivering this content and I have to say he did it in an awesome way. Despite the network connection problems we had (which delayed the tutorial a bit), we got along very well by the time everyone had their environment setup. Stuart's tutorial was full of hands-on code. This course was not only a lot of fun and laughs, but interesting content too. I'm looking forward to using Phix to create my components repository, maybe pairing its workflow with the chef-based one we are already adopting at Ibuildings. Definitely a thumbs up for Stuart's project.
We’re sharing a series of posts from our developers who attended DPC 2011, telling us about their experiences of the event.
This year as part of the Ibuildings team I attended the Dutch PHP Conference for the first time. What can I say? Well, it was an unbelievable experience; I enjoyed every moment spent there. I found it good first of all for the big names of the involved people such as Sebastian Bergmann, Derick Rethans, Fabien Potencier, Enrico Zimuel plus many others. There was also the high quality of the presented talks, but also for the great opportunity to spend good time with my colleagues at Ibuildings and people from other companies all around the world.
Day 2 started with Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson's keynote about First Class APIs development, why the API should become a first class citizen in the company development strategy, how to achieve this results in the most effective way possible and what the benefits from this approach can be.
After that I needed to decide which talks to go to and this decision was anything but simple because most of them were very interesting, not forgetting the uncon submissions that were very good too.
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We recently wrapped up the first Ibuildings challenge of 2011; a contest to create a virtual gamer able to play Four in a Line (you might also know it as Four in a Row, Connect Four or Find Four). Ibuildings provided the gaming field and the abstract player class that everyone needed to extend, and the competitors provided the rest. This post announces the winners and makes some observations based on the submissions we received.
Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill. Each game was played on the official 7 x 6 grid on a basis of three rounds per game. At the end of each qualification session only the players with the highest score moved further in the tournament.
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19th - 20th September 2013
