Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

On November 20th dynamic-webpages.de will start with the first "Professional PHP" online training. This series of online sessions offers you "24 hours of PHP knowledge, from professionals, to professionals". Topics covered in this series of talks are:

• Object orientation and patterns
• Regular Expressions
• Object-Relational-Mapping
• Security
• XML and Webservices
• Testing with PHPUnit
• AJAX and PHP
• Debugging using Xdebug
• Image manipulation
• PEAR
• Zend Framework
• eZ Components

Several speakers will take care about the different topics, among those are Kore Nordmann (Regex, Images and PHPUnit), Christian Wenz (Security, XML, Webservices), Stephan Schmidt for the OO and patterns section and other community known experts. I myself will present the topics "Xdebug" and "eZ Components".

All talks will last about 2 hours (possibly a bit longer) and will take place on a dedicated day so you are not too filled up with knowledge afterwards. The sessions are presented in German language using a professional online training system, that allows you to interact with the presenter and other attendees in writing and speaking.

Since it is the first time this course is scheduled, you will receive a 200,- € discount when booking right now, so take your heels and jump over to the dynamic-webpages.de training and certification page and save your seat!

I finally added a button for being a "Zend Advisory Board Member" to my blog. I did not have the logo so far.

Now that I saw that some professional PHP developers already took the exam, and considered it much better than the PHP 4 version ^{1 2 3}, I am really proud of beeing part of the creators crew. I think we really created a good certification to make employers decide, if somebody is only a "PHP script kiddie", who thinks to know PHP because he has written his own crappy guestbook, or if someone is a professional PHP developer, who knows what he does.

Thanks to Zend for letting me being part of the certification crew, after I complained about the low level of the last exam! I hope to also be part of the PHP 6 certification creators! :)

^{Hehe, I actually did not take the exam myself, yet, because of a lag of time. Hopefully I will pass my own exam! ;)}

I just stumbled over this rumor. The article states, that Oracle is planning to take over up to 3 open source companies, including JBoss and Zend. Let's see, where this leads...

P.S.: Reminds me again on some april fool I made almost 2 years ago... ^{1 2}

Since some others already blogged to be within the first 1000 Zend certified engineers, I feel to raise my 2ct, too. I took the exam during the PHP Quebec conference in Montreal last March. I was actually suprised to pass the exam without any kind of preperation, after Marcus, John and some others convinced my to have a try (it was free there, so I took the chance). At least that shows that you should be able to pass the exam with real-world PHP experience.

Congratulations to Zend for making their certification that public!

I'm sure it's a good marketing thing for them and at least the certification allows employers to devide between real developers and script-kiddies in some ways. For those certifieds I'm actually not sure, the 1000 mark means only good. Maybe the certification exam is to easy? One has to concider that, the more certifieds exist, the more it reduces the "level of professionality" attested for them and the more likely the certification looses it's use for them as their own self-marketing instrument.

Anyway, having a certification in place at all is a good thing. I hope that Zend comes up with a more advanced version of the certification (maybe some "Zend certified PHP wizard"?). This would be a great addition and allow people to show their advanced PHP capabilities. Let me know, if there is going on something in that direction.

So long, happy PHP coding! :)

On Monday I arrived back in Germany from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. Other people already posted detailed round ups ^{1 2 3} on this great event, so from my side only few words on the actual event: It was damn cool! :) The conference itself was a very well working mixture of business and geek talks, the sessions were chosen really good. As usual I met a whole lot of old friends (like Markus Börger, John Coggeshall, Christian Wenz and even Sterling Hughes) and made another lot of new ones. The location was really nice and the events they organized were real fun. So, all in all: My appreciation to Zend for this great event!

Update Oct. 30: I recently added 2 movies Gregor made during our heli trip to my gallery. Really cool! :)

But now, let's come to the more unofficial part: On Friday, after the last keynote, Gregor Streng (from Mayflower) and me moved to a hotel downtown San Francisco, directly at the Union Square, to have 3 more days of enjoying San Francisco itself (since the Conference took place in a town near SFO airport: Burlingame). We had 3 fantastic days in "the City" and did lot's of sight seeing, like flying over SF with a helicopter, touring to Sausalito with a bike, going out for party with Sterling, and much more. Just to make you curious, here just a few of the amazing pictures we took:

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All in all it was an amazing trip and I love San Francisco, it's flair, the people and the whole city. I will definitly come back one day... Hopefully this is next year for another Zend/PHP Conference and Expo. Thanks so much for bringing me there!!! :)

I recently uploaded my slides from the PEAR introductional presentation I held 15 minutes ago here at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Francisco. The slides should also appear in about 30 minutes on the PEAR websites support section.

I really had lot's of attendants in that talk and there were lots of questions asked, especially about PEAR 1.4 and channels. I also received much feedback from people who already use PEAR for rapid prototyping or development in general and every bit of that was positive. Very good to hear. :)

Yesterday I arrived here in San Francisco, together with Gregor Streng from Mayflower, for the Zend/PHP conference and expo. The flight was a bit hard (12 hrs sitting is not what you really want to do) and the jetlag caught me yesterday afternoon during dinner, but overall I'm really happy to be here. :) I already saw parts of Frisco when driving to dinner and the Californian environment ist really nice (although the weather is quiet cloudy). As usual there are lots of wellknown people here and I expect to have lots of fun with all those collegues and friends form the community. Since I missed to by an AC adapter (I was sure to be able to rent one here) I'm currently out of power most time, but I hope to fix that soon, so that I can upload some photos and write some more on the conference.

For those of you who can not attend the Conference here in the US (all you European and mainly German geeks), I can only recommend joining the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt this November (6th to 9th). It's one of the oldest and most established community events and you get the chance to meet all those PHP gurus, who push PHP forward every day, in person. Beside that, you can join my phantastic workshop on how to distribute your applications through the new PEAR Installer version 1.4 and your own PEAR channel server.

So long, have a good time!

After some conference-free time over the summer, I'll attend 2 conferences until the end of the year:

• Zend Expo San Francisco (USA), Oct. 18th - 21st
• International PHP conference Frankfurt (Germany), Nov. 6th - 9th

I'll give talks at both events. Especially interessting might be my workshop about "Distributing PHP applications with PEAR", where you can learn how to set up a PEAR channel server, how to package your application into the PEAR package format and how to distribute your applications through your own PEAR channel (usin the PEAR Installer 1.4.x). It'll take place on Sunday, November 6th at the Frankfurt conference.

I'm pretty much looking forward to seeing Frisco (I've only been once to the US by now, which was Atlanta in 1996) and to meeting all of you PHP geeks attending those conferences, too. :)

I recently received my results from the Zend Certification Exam and (luckily) I passed it. So, from now on, I can call myself a "Zend Certified Engineer". Nice. :)

Zend is sponsoring the PHP Conference Quebec 2005 and forethat they offer free Zend Certification for visitors and speakers. Since it's free, I tried passing it (mostly for fun) without any kind of preperation (neither example exam, nor the certification guide). Would be cool if that worked, although it's been quite a challange in some way.

For example I've never used the $_REQUEST array, since I always use $_GET or $_POST (and, if I might occasionally have to use cookies, which did not happen often until now, I'd use $_COOKIE). So, the questions I got regarding $_REQUEST I had to guess. Of course, I had to guess all questions on cookies in general. There's been 1 situation were I explicitly had to use cookies and that's about 2 years ago. I usually use sessions and do not allow users to do such wired stuff as "keep logged in over session timouts".

Nevertheless if I passed or not (ok, not passing would be a shame in someway, even without preperation...), it's really a good certification. There are many questions, which you cannot answer by learning from a book, but only with real programming experiences. Quite felicitous.

The only bummer is, that Daniel (the Zend guy here for administering the certification) had to let us do the exam on paper, which means that I will receive the result in about 2-4 weeks, when Daniel scanned and evaluated it. I'm really very curious on the result.

^{Hopefully I did not betrayal too much about the exam.}

@Chris: You're a wimp, come on, just try taking the exam! ;)

Last year a posted an april fool on that topic, from which now a very small bit becomes reality. Hopefully not the bad part. ;)

Surfing along