Currently I’m also on a three month contract ending June 30th where I work three days a week with a European debt collection system in Fuengirola, Spain. I have been involved in the project every now and then for the past two years now. Fun and very interesting – but also challenging – as we’re a small team creating a complex system integrating many very different external systems (ranging from newly designed SOAP services to old COBOL systems to Windows bookkeeping applications. All in PHP of course. Beginning of July I’ll have some vacation and then we’ll just have too see what comes up.

So I thought I’d throw in an update of Wordpress and a new theme here on my blog as well… about time.

I will continue to blog about PHP, javascript and web development here. I might even try to increase the number of posts. Oh I’ve never promised myself that before, have I Anyway, our Swedish blog will not be as technical as here on dotvoid.com. Instead the blog will focus on the company and what we do as well as web development in Sweden and Europe in general.

Even though free time has been somewhat scarce I have tried improving my routines when it comes to development and coding. But as the workload has been going up and down a lot I’ve mostly used the few slow periods to relax. I haven’t been to a PHP conference since 2007 and a more general software development conference since 2006. I feel I’ve been, work aside, somewhat lazy the last two years.

So I decided it is time to read a bit more on agile methologies, Zend Framework, setup a completely new laptop development environment using Ubuntu 9.10, Zend Studio 7.1 and Zend Server. I will also try out Mingle from Thoughtworks for project management. Ok the last thing can be a bit weird having only one additional team member besides myself on current projects. But I’ve been interested in trying it out ever since hearing about it by Dan North from Thoughtworks in an software development conference a couple of years back. Expensive but interesting to see if it can be used in teams trying to stay agile even though they are spread out geographically.

At the moment I’m rereading the excellent book Practices of an Agile Developer. It is a brilliant book packed with inspiration that can help you develop and improve your habits for an agile approach to software development. It is good to browse through it every once in a while to remind yourself on how you should work Conveniently enough I was also just recently shipped a copy of Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development which I hope will be an interesting read as well. I also feel it is about time I read a more in depth book on XP or Scrum. I’ll see what good books I can find on that topic.

So the next few weeks, when I’m not working or trying to be a good dad to my daughters, I will try not to shut down my brain in front of the TV and instead study for a bit.

In my experience, trying out new things and reading a few good books, can do wonders to your inspiration and also give you more energy to face both challenging as well as more mundane, even boring, tasks.

Even though all the project members are located in many different locations in both Sweden and Spain most things have gone really well.

After having been in Spain for the last six months it looks like it’s time to move on. In a few weeks we’re probably moving to Kalmar, Sweden. We haven’t lived in those parts since we moved to Dublin in 2000 and even though I really enjoyed my time here in Spain I am a looking forward to moving back home.

Conferences? Apart from the usual PHP conferences that might or mightn’t (!?) be of interest there’s a score of other events focusing less on technology and more on softer issues. An hour ago I received an email from the Ning group Swedish Startups with lots of interesting conferences. I probably won’t be able to attend many of those. But Future of Web Apps in Dublin really caught my attention. A not too expensive one day event with lots of cool people and companies. Not to mention a good reason to visit the city I lived in almost eight years ago. (At the time I was working as a contractor on a then cool project.)

View Larger Map

1. Faster Eclipse/PDT/Zend IDE
2. Builtin, reliable, refactoring support in PDT
3. A good (good === simple and extensive) tutorial on using Zend_Test for testing applications built on Zend Framework – cause I’m starting to feel stupid here.

Apart from those three PHP specific wishes I also wish for all the usual stuff; a new mobile (I’ll buy one myself soon), more spare time with my family and friends (I’ll get that soon as well), world peace (tough one unfortunately), new laptop (my currrent – almost new – Dell sucks) and more.

I will get more free time soon. I’m selling the house in southern Sweden and moving with my family to southern Spain where I will work as a contractor for major Spanish consumer sites. Fun PHP work ahead!

Unfortunately we three were the only ones showing up so the event will be repeated next thursday. If you are interested in business, technology, internet and web development – and are nearby – drop in!

The framework is getting better and better even though I probably never will use things like the form builder functionality. One should never say never. But it seems backwards to me and I think it makes it more difficult to produce more advanced user friendly form based applications. Maybe I should force myself to use it a few times so that I can have a better opinion on it. Maybe…

Anyways, I’m more than happy with the first few days.

I am finally converting my old blog away from my own, very old, solution into using wordpress. Unfortunately I have lost all comments due to some holes in the old solution.

As I work on PHP related projects (more than) fulltime now I will again focus on writing about things of interest in the PHP sphere.

This is our office at Mesh