Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

Today the PHP Usergroup Dortmund turns 2 years and I want to congratulate with this small post!

We are looking back on 2 years of professional information exchange on PHP and other geek topics, as well as on lots and lots of great fun. The past year was especially moving for us. The usergroup constantly grew and we now have a group of 5 people (Tobi, Kore, Jakob, Peter, Manuel) meeting on a weekly basis and a fluctuating group of about 20 poeple who turn up irregularly from time to time. And with those guys we organized a lot of great events in the last year, beside our regular meetings which mostly consist of having some beer, hacking and chatting:

On March 9th 2006 we celebrated into the 1st birthday of the usergroup. A week later, we decided to make our own little PHP sub conference on the FrOSCon, the Free and OpenSource Conference in Bonn. On the same day, we announced the first talk for this year in our usergroup, where I talked about eZ Components and infected a lot of the groupies with an addiction to them. By the end of may, we finished our call for papers for the PHP room at the FrOSCon and started deciding on our agenda, which turned out with a lot of interessting talks in mid June. At the end of this month the first FrOSCon conference took place and the PHP room as well as the 3 talks Kore and me gave, were a great success. As a result from this, we started planning the "PHP introduction workshop" during July, which should be held at the local university. After the summer whole, during September, we finished planning this idea finally, which turned out to become a small 2 day conference with 2 sessions tracks: The PHP Weekender was born. We especially enjoyed this event and it was a huge success. In November we (somewhat unintended) celebrated Helloween and nominated Kore to be the "Hacking witch". Over the year border between 2006 and 2007 we had another series of talks, where up to 20 people turned up in the office of eZ Systems to meet with us.

Now that we turn 2, we have another series of talks upcoming. As Kore already announced, Jan Lenhardt will give 2 talks: One on "HTTP(S) load balancing and high availability with Wackamole", which will take place next Thursday, and on on "CouchDB - An alternative to MySQL" on the Thursday after that.

So, my fellow PHP usergroupies, I'm looking forward to another year of great fun with you all! :)

Yes, it's true, exactly 3 years ago I wrote my first blog entry. By that time I would never have imagined, that I would keep blogging for more than 3 years and that more or less constantly. My weblog now contains 458 entries. Surely, there is some bulshit in it and if I go back, I sometimes wonder, why a specific entry was worth blogging to me. Anyway, in this entry, I want to make a little journey with you and give you some links to the most interessting / annoying / funny / useful / useless / ... blurbs on this site. But before we start, here some more or less actual stats:

Of the 11 categories in my blog, PHP is the largest one, with 167 entries, followed by PEAR (91), Geek (78), Community related (55) and Private (36) and eZ (34). The category with the feewest entries is University with just 3 entries. I recieved 540 comments so far (no, no spam counted) and the most commented entry was my discussion about the sponsored link practices of phpfreaks.com with 28 comments, directly followed by Comfortable PHP editing with VIM -3- with 20 comments. Aaron and Derick wrote the most comments on my weblog, followed by John Doe (the annonymous poster), altogether with 38 comments. All of my blurbs together contain 592764 characters.

But that should be all with boring figures. Let's start a little journey through the past 3 years...

On October 25th 2003 I announced my first talk at the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. I still remember that I attended it for the first time the year before and was really exciteted to go there as a speaker. This year this is not really anything special anymore, since I've been there every year now since 2003 and will again give some cool talks there. Shortly after that, I already proposed a talk at the PHP Quebec Conference... ;)

On January 17th 2004 I switched from KDE to Gnome, which was a very wise decision... I'm still with Gnome. 1 week later Chregu and me opened Planet-PHP. While the site is hosted and was mostly built by him, we together hold the dominion about the aggregated blogs. Another day later, I announced PEPr, the PEAR Proposal System, which is still in use in the PEAR project to accept/reject new packages. Browsing through the blurbs I remeber again how my car was broken a few days later *damn*.

A somewhat rediculous discussion was the issue, whether PHP5s new OO extensions should use studlyCaps or underscores. But that was already clearified, when a few days later IBM took over Zend. It still scares me, that I predicted something like that... ;) It's almost akward, that I asked what the PHP CLI switch -a means on April 13th 2004... I wouldn't want to live without it anymore, now!

While on the 14th of June 2004 I announced the election of the PEAR QA team, I'm still sad, that I did not have enough time to work on it. A very funny and useful event a few weeks later, was the Anti-Software-Patents-Demo at Linuxtag 2004. I still remeber as if it was yesterday, as we went at the front of the demonstration, dressed like prisoners. I was quite happy, when my employer these times warned for software patents, a few days later.

I think a great day for the whole PHP community was the 14th of July 2004, when PHP 5 was released stable. Quite funny was the discussion about GOTO in PHP some weeks later. In relation to programming, I loved to read "Mastering Regular Expressions", these days. There are still one of my favorite languages, what maybe somewhat related to my usage of VIM. :)

The PHP World congress I attended in 2004 was kinda akward for me. I was used to geek conferences and therefore just took Jeans and T-Shirts with me to Munich... That was a mistake... All of the speakers wear suites and I was the only geek-looking guy around... ;) On October 4th 2004 I blogged about 1 year of blogging. Since I'm now half through my blog, it seems my blogging frequency became less in the past years.

On November 11th 2004 I wrote my first "Comfortable PHP editing with VIM" post, which became a really cool series of entries and I recently posted part 5 of it. VIM is really a cool editor and if you get used to its features once, you can be much more productive with it, than with any fully blown IDE.

PEAR turned 5 on November 21st 2004. You remeber that I wrote I applied for the PHP Quebec Conference? It did not happen in 2004, but I was there in 2005 and it really was a great event! :) On the 18th of March 2005 it was Unix time 1111111111. A few days later in Canada (forgive me that it's sometime Kanada in my blog, thats the Germany spelling), I took the Zend Certification exam, which turned out to be a success a few weeks later, not even thinking about, that I will be part of the certification team in 2006.

Being back from Canada, I joined the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. The usergroup was not very active these days, but more than 1 year later I can say, that we have a really cool core group of about 8 people who meat every week and a wider circle of about 15-20 people who turn around occasionally. With this, please do not forget to sign up for our first large PHP event, the PHP Weekender!

On June the 6th 2005 I started with eZ systems, where I still work happily on the eZ components project. A few days later we celebrated a decade of PHP online, while we had a somewhat official real-life celebration some days later on Linuxtag.

These days Kore Nordmann (yes the guy who made Image_3D) also convinced me to switch to Gentoo, which I'm now happily using for more than a year. On July 30th 2005 I went to Norway for the first time, to visit the eZ systems headquaters and to get the eZ components project started. During that time I also wrote Pearadise (the PEAR channel aggregator), which is still in beta phase, since I had no more time to work on it... Hope I will find time during the next semester!

September 2005 was a quite busy month. Greg Beaver released the PEAR Installer in version 1.4 stable, which allowed people to distribute their own applications with it. During that month I also went to San Francisco, which is one of the cities in the world I like most. I really enjoyed that trip. A month later I recieved a really great gift from my Amazon wishlist from Vidyut Luther.

During the PHP Conference 2005 in Frankfurt Sebastian Nohn drew a quite nice picture of Kore and me in Dortmund. December 2005 and January 2006 were a quite busy time, since we headed forward to the eZ components release 1.0 (30th of January), for which Kore and me baked a nice birthday cake.

In March this year, we celebrated the 1st anniversary of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. In April Kore made some more cool 3D stuff and Sebastian Bergmann joined us at eZ systems. In May I went ot Bari for an italian PHP conference. Also a very very great trip!

So, and with a larger jump we are here, today, with blog post number 458. You might be wondering, how I can blog right now, because I'm currently on vacation. I have to admit, that I here used Serendipities time-driven publishing feature for the first time. Anyway, it was quite funny to browse through my whole blog one time yesterday and I hope I continue blogging for another 3 years.

So long...

Yesterday way my first anniversary with eZ systems. Exactly 1 year and 1 day ago I signed my contract and started working for our German eZ branch. While being first employed as a freelancer (for my own wish) I soon started to work exclusively for eZ, when I came to the eZ components project at the end of July last year. Sure, I'm also doing some stuff beside (or better: in cooperation with) my work at eZ systems, but the company has evolved to my absolute primary employer.

On August 2nd 2005 we officially announced the development of a new enterprise PHP 5 library, the eZ components. We took more then 3 weeks of full time work of 5 people to get the basis of eZ components designed, before I returned from Norway to Germany again and started developing and documenting, until the first beta of eZ components came to light on November 28th. I never worked on a real company product before (only for custom inter-/intranet solutions) and bringing out a first beta was absolutely exciting. The coolest thing I felt about my job was, that I got payed for what I did as one of my greatest hobbies before. Yeah! That was (and still is) what I always wanted!

Finally, on the 30th of January, we released the first stable version of eZ components and I really had the feeling that we were on a very good way to make a great piece of software. Indeed, so far I did not loose the feeling, but it got only stronger and stronger. I remember having the birthday cake, Kore and me made these days, as if it was yesterday. Now that it's going to be 1.1 final in a few weeks, I feel that I have to thank a lot of people at eZ systems for my time so far.

Thanks to Sandro for telling me I should apply for eZ systems, when moving to Dortmund. Thanks to Ralf for accepting my application. Thanks to Kore and Tobias for so many great times. Thanks to Aleksander and Bard for supporting my personal evolution. Thanks to Amos, Derick, Fred and Ray for really good teamwork and lots of constructive discussions. Also special thanks to Derick for correcting my English over and over, guiding me through Skien and for Nasi! Thanks to Terje and Nina for bringing me to the phpDay in Bari. And finally thanks to Peter, Kristian and all the others for some great party and lots and lots of fun!

All you people at eZ systems: Stay as you are and keep up all the greatnesses! I really enjoy working with you and I hope that this relationship will go on for a long long time...

The local PHP usergroup turns 1. The actual annuary of the first meeting is tomorrow, but since we meet every Thursday, we celebrate the birthday today. Although I'm not a member of the first minute, I'm one of the oldest members there. It's very nice to see, what we reached so far. The group grew from a bunch of 4 people that started to meet, to being a real user group by now. Our mailinglist counts 34 subscribers so far and the meetings take place every week with always between 5 to 15 people. We already had a bunch of presentation during our meetings, we had lots of fun just sitting around and ranting about technical stuff and tend to meet for hacking around PHP. But also beside these meetings, we have a fairly good running ICR channel (#phpug on EUIRC) where usually 10-20 people are in. It's very cool to have a bunch of geeks around oneself. Not only that you always have cool ideas (of which you can realize about 5% in your lifetime), but also that you can discuss technical decisions so easily and can have input on all those problems you have.

My special thanks go to Tobias Struckmeier (a friend of mine who is also working for eZ) who founded the usergroup last year. Tobias is very active in managing all the small issues with the group and managed to keep it up and running for a complete year now. Great work man! :) Keep itu up!

Although we already celebrated this event last Wednesday in Germany, I feel I should post a photo of Kore's and my fabulous birthday cake for the eZ components 1.0 release:

Nice, isn't it? :)

Happy birthday eZ components! Live long and prosper!

The language we all love more and more over the years turns 10. Following the example of Zak I want to thank all those brave guys and girls behind PHP. I've neither been with PHP since it's birth, nor since it's so early ours, but I've enjoyed its greatnesses (and sometimes hated its bugs) for more than a half of its life.

Update, 8th of June, 07:50

See, what other people say for PHP's 10th birthday (my own little look back on my life with PHP is in the extended entry)...

• Christian Stocker
• Derick Rethans
• Davey Shafik
• John Coggeshall
• Lukas Smith
• Wez Furlong
• John Lim
• Christian Wenz & Tobias Hauser
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Andrei Zmievski
• George Schlossnagle
• Greg Beaver

I hope that PHP stay's what it is for a long long long time: My absolute favorit in programming languages.

Thanks a lot to everyone who contributes to PHP, you all out there do a fantastic job!

If one takes Malin Bakken's (to whome PEAR is dedicated) birthday as the beginning of PEAR, today is Malin's and PEAR's 5th birthday. The first bit of code for PEAR was commited 1 day later, so this is a reasonable approximation in my eyes for the birth of PEAR.

This celebration should be a reason to take a little view on the beginnings of PEAR. Some historical highlights, quoted from the PEAR website:

• 1999-11-21 : Malin Bakken was born
• 1999-11-22 : The first few lines of PEAR code were committed (DB.php)
• 2000-07-24 : The PEAR and PEAR_Error classes were born
• 2000-08-01 : First working version of the "pear" command
• 2001-05-15 : First contributor to base system
• 2001-12-28 : First package uploaded to the current pear.php.net
• 2002-05-26 : Installer can upgrade itself
• 2002-06-13 : First version of Gtk installer
• 2002-07-11 : First version of Web installer

In this sense: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MALIN! HAPPY BIRTHDAY PEAR!

Yeah, it's true... since yesterday I'm 24 and 1 year nearer to my annuity... ;)

Though, it was the stressiest day at work for about 2 months and the only party I had were 2 beer with collegues in the early evening.

No matter, I think birthdays get less important each year... At least since one has become 18... ;)