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.)

“Using your brain while developing is really helpful” – Lars Jankowfsky. Maybe I should stop the bad habit of lazy coding while watching TV…

One thing that makes me happy is that they have added a session on Zend Framework. I look forward to that as I have begun to rely on Zend Framework quite a lot.

IPC 2007 and Ajax In Action

Lars Jankowfsky during his session

This year seems to be different though. A whole slew of interesting sessions on PHP mixed with a few sessions on agile development. Sounds just about perfect to me. I am especially interested in the one PHP 6 session as I have not had the time to follow what is happening in regards to next major version of PHP. I’m definitely going to Frankfurt this November. There are still too many sessions in German if you ask me – but I guess there are quite a few Germans going to the conference.

Expo-C in Karlskrona, Sweden, have always been a treat. The last conference was held last spring and focused on agile principles and test (behaviour) driven development. Language wise it was great. Java, Ruby, C#, Python and even Visual Basic had their slots. One thing was missing though. My favourite language PHP. After the conference I spoke to Anki, one of the organisors about it and I promised to get back to her before the next spring conference and discuss what we could do about it. Unfortunately I had no idea that they would also have an autumn conference this time. So there will be no speakers from the PHP community this time either. I still will try to “help” them get a PHP speaker for the spring conference. I’ll talk to her when I meet her in november.

It would be really fun to try and organise a small Swedish or even a Nordic PHP conference.

I have just spent two days with a collegue at the conference Expo-C in Karlskrona, Sweden. The first day of the conference was a treat. Dan North from Thoughtworks had a whole day on the topic “Health Factors for Agile Development”. A whole day of agile discussions without one single powerpoint slide. Well spent time. Agile development, for those not in the know, is a loose collection of methodologies that in a many ways turn the traditional waterfall method upside down.

I am in some ways already using at least some of the principles of agile development. It is however difficult in a large consultancy company with its own huge methodologies for everything around application life cycle management, development and so on. Even so, I do know a few larger companies that use agile methods, that have used them for some time. One example is Iona that are big in integration. They pushed XP heavily when I last had a conversation with their recruitment departement in Dublin five years ago. Even though I have always liked the principles of XP and other agile development methodologies I have never liked the fanatical “all or nothing” message. That is why Dan Norths session was so refreshing.

Dan North seems to have a very pragmatic view of agile development. Sometimes words like pair programming pops up and it is clear that he is a fan of that. But Dan mostly push forward the importance of converting from the traditional waterfall process into a more iterative process. I think it is important not to misinterpret this as having the same meaning as iterative in RUP for example. In mastodont methodologies like RUP iterative is more about splitting large projects into a managable chunks – or releases. That is not being iterative.

Maybe the most important message is that agile development really is about communication and trust. That is what it boils down to. As Dan put it – “if possible; send email instead of documents, use IM instead of email, call instead of sending email or walk over to the other guys desk instead of calling”. Bring communication as close to the people involved as possible. This is hard in an organisation or in a consultant/client situation where there is no trust. Most documentation in traditional projects don’t really have a clear receiver. It is only used in the blame game that follows a failed project. When you trust each other, and work together towards a solution, problems occurs more seldom. Development, if you think about it, should be all about collaboration, to work towards a common goal, and having fun doing it.

Later on I might write something more on BDD, Behaviour Driven Development, which Dan North spoke about in a smaller session the next day. BDD changes the terminology slightly around Test Driven Development in a way that I think makes this more acceptable to many developers.

However, now that I think back, the conference in Frankfurt could have been a lot better. It should have been better considering the money they charge. Most of the sessions were way to shallow and a few were mere walkthroughs of simple code examples that you can read up on in 15 minutes in so many places on the web. Some sessions I attended were more like a two hour introduction into a topic. These beginner sessions have their place in a conference like this but they were too many. Most of the speakers are probably very knowledgeble in their respective area. Unfortunately very few showed it.

I think it would be much more valuable if more sessions were geared towards more experienced developers. I would like to see more sessions on case studies, best practices, experiences from using different techniques and systems in large installations or common/uncommon problems and how to solve them. Only Björn Schotte didn’t disapoint me in this respect. Especially sessions regarding web services and integration should have benefited from such an approach. I’d better admit that I didn’t attend many database sessions. So I don’t know if they were better than the more PHP specific ones.

Maybe I would have liked the Management Day. I don’t know. Since it was all in german I couldn’t attend. Which brings me to my next complaint. I understand that the organizer is a german company. A few german sessions would be fine. However, the conference is called “International” as in the English magazine from this very company. Even the O’Reilly booth featured mostly books in the german language. Maybe I’m just a bit annoyed since I missed a few sessions due to the language barrier.

I’m not going to say much about the wireless connection. It was bad. Many others have written more on this topic.

Well, if I go next year, I’ll skip the two workshop days anyway. Those were clearly not worth the money.

(Oh by the way – Derick Rethans seems to be much nicer in real life than he is in emails.)

I wasn’t very happy with wither either FCKeditor or any of the alternatives as they were either bloated or badly implemented or both. To be honest I didn’t do a very thorough analysis. But as stupid as I can be at time I told myself that I could do it better. Another voice (?) instantly challenged me with the words “prove it”.

Implementing things like a good and simple extensions api, i18n and theming and still keep the total file size to a minimum is not that easy… Well it is finally starting to evolve into something really nice. I won’t release the source yet as I want the basic features to be rock solid but here is a nice little screenshot of the editor in Swedish using a Gnome theme.

FireEditor - wysiwyg editor in Firesite. The icons are made by my girlfriend for another project.

Starting this weekend I will take a couple of days off and attend the PHP Conference in Frankfurt. I really hope it will be as good as when I was there in 2003. It would be fun to know if there are more people coming down from Sweden. If you’d fancy a beer or two in the bar with a fellow Swedish just send me an email through my contact form.

Today I attended the Expo-C conference in Karlskrona, Sweden. Today was seminar day with a series of sessions on different software architectures. Even though they primarily used Java and .NET rather than PHP or C++ to discuss topics in a more practical a few of the sessions were really good. (Hopefully they’ll learn that better chairs is a must till next years conference.)

Besides Service Orientation I’m especially interested in AOP or Aspect Oriented Programming. I haven’t had the time before to really look into it that deep. I know that we’re kind of using it in integration with proxies that intercept remote calls with Iona Orbix. Of course I started wondering if there are any PHP projects in this area. A quick search came up with a few interesting links concerning PHP…

I will not be able to go to the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt this year. Even though the conference is set in an extremely boring industrial area outside of Frankfurt last years conference was great. The sessions and the powerworkshops I attended last year were all worth every penny spent.

The only thing not worth mentioning is last years evening party. Free beer of course but they made us dance…