Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

When you get stuck, who do you look to? I’m not asking in the spiritual or existential sense, I mean, in real life, when you hit a problem, do you have someone you can ask?

A lot of you who read this are developers – mostly PHP developers. When you hit a wall programmatically, do you have a person you know you can turn to and ask for help? Or even just ask an opinion? If not, that should be a priority for you.

One of the great things about the PHP community is that the members are so giving. I have been a member of several communities revolving around programming languages and have to say that the PHP is by far the most open and giving. It is one of the great assets of the language.

In the past year, I started getting more connected to my local tech and social media community here in Nashville. I am nowhere near being a Social Media expert so I am always looking to add people to my list of people I can look to for help. Lucky for me in Nashville we have a lot of really smart marketing people who are willing to share what they know.

Harvey MacKay summed it up nicely in the title of one of his books, “Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You’ll Ever Need“. Start getting to know people now, even if you don’t have questions.

Until next time,
I <3
=C=

Dear Reader,

Both of you that read this blog regularly know that I’ve been playing around with the Klout API. For a while now Klout has been my new shiny. Last week I started actually hitting their API and gathering info. At first, I just wanted to see what they had available. However, as I started to see the data come in, I started to find out some interesting things. (A little side note, their API is run by the cool folks over at Mashery. /me waves oh hai to Kirsten and Rob)

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Dear Reader,

[Author's Note: Fridays should be fun. If you are a manager, try taking one Friday a month and let your developers do whatever they want. Trust them to do something but don't give them any parameters at all. See what they dream up.]

When I venture out into the real world, the one not populated with developers, I get a lot of strange looks and odd stares when I talk. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who don’t grok grep, have never been slashdotted, and can’t tell a brown number from a WAG. I saw r0ml give a talk one year about domain specific languages and how they are important. I apologize to r0ml for bastardizing his idea but today I am going to share five of our more colorful terms from the software development DSL.
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Dear Reader,

I’ve been teaching a Zend Framework class this week and my students have been throwing all kinds of questions at me. Most recently, while we were discussing creating a Bootstrap class for an application a question came up about the _init* functions.

The manual states that

$bootstrap->bootstrap();

will fire all of the _init* functions in the bootstrap class. However, the question came up, in what order? Thanks to friends like Rob Allen (author of “Zend Framework in Action“), I was able to give them the answer.

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Dear Reader,

Ever wonder where you could get one of those cool PHPWomen T-Shirts? Well now you don’t have to travel to a conference just to get one. Now you can order your very own from their new PHPWomen T-Shirt Shop. They have a variety of styles and colors including one just for guys to show their support for the organization.

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