Just Testing the Waters

I am considering moving my blog here (from the wordpress I host currently)

I like blogger since I will no longer have to do blog software updates, something I never seem to get time for.

I discovered SyntaxHighlighter, so now that requirement is taken care of.

<br /><?php if($blogger->maint_effort < $wpress->maint_effort && $blogger->highlighting) {<br /> $blogger->use();<br />}<br />

Startupalooza

Exciting event coming up at the end of March. Startupalooza is gaining steam, building quite the list of product demo’s (including Fyreball, my current employer). The event designed to be Those who have walked the path, sharing their knowledge and experiences with those interested in beginning startups. This is not a typical startup event where the goal is to impress VC’s in the crowd (though I’m sure a few will be lurking).

Event is: Saturday, March 29, 2008, 2:00 PM - 7:00 PM

RSVP at Upcoming

Ignite Portland 2

Looks much bigger (550+ registered) and better this go around. I went to Ignite 1 and had an excellent time. Can’t wait to see how it goes this time.

Happening Feb 5, 2008 : doors open at 5:15pm at the Bagdad.

Ignite Portland home page

register here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/390164/

“Portland On Fire” Profiling Local Individuals

Portland On Fire is a site launched by Raven Zachary on the first day of 2008. It’s goal is to give a quick bio of local folks, showing what they’ve done and what they are currently up to. It is starting with people in the tech and arts sector but the hope is that it expands out to all corners of the Portland talent pool.

Book Review: PHP In Action

Authors: Dagfinn Reiersol, Marcus Baker, Chris Shiflett
2007 Manning Publications
525 pages

This book is geared toward the intermediate PHP developer who wants to bring in aspects of OOP, Testing and Refactoring to help improve the quality of the code they write. It is split into four parts; Basic Tools and Concepts, Testing and Refactoring, Building the Web Interface, and Databases and Infrastructure.

In addition to PHP, I have decent amount of experience with Java and Java web frameworks such as Struts. So as I worked through this book much of the content was familiar to me but from a Java perspective. It was enlightening to see the authors express these same concepts from a PHP perspective. The fact that many times (not always), the implementation in PHP is more concise and elegant that the Java alternative really shows of the power of a dynamically typed language such as PHP. Also the fact that PHP was bred from the beginning to be a web development language gives it a definate advantage in the web arena.
The authors are honest though, they haven’t simply painted implementing OO, TDD, and Refactoring as completelty painless. For instance in the testing portion they’ve devoted quite a bit of time to showing the difficulties of testing (especially in a Web environment). Such as the need for mock objects and the difficulty in keeping mocks “real enough” so they fail and pass as the real object would. This full disclosure is key for readers to estimate if the extra effort of a concept is worth the benefits for their particual situation.

Overall this is great book for the intended audience. It is not “black and white” about the solutions it proposes. Reasonable alternatives are given and the pros and cons of each are expressed. For those with extensive OO experience, some portions of the book may seem trivial but overall it is still worth a “quick scan” to see the specifics of PHP implementations of general OO concepts.

Book Review: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites

Title: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites
Author: Alan Bradburne
ISBN: 1590598415
ISBN-13: 9781590598412
421 pages
Published: Jun 2007

So far my web development background has mainly consisted of Java (J2EE) and PHP. I just started playing with Ruby and now Ruby on Rails. I’ve worked through a few of the tutorials linked from www.rubyonrails.org. So essentially I had two or three ‘proof of concept’ sites with models consisting of two to three tables each. So of course at that point I wanted to ramp it up and build a ‘real’ site but that leap from demo site to a production ready, real world site can be a tough one to make. “Practical Rails Social Networking Sites” can certainly help you in that undertaking.

During the span of the book, Alan leads you through building an actual web application with many of the Web 2.0 features you would expect. When you are through with this book, you will have a simple “content management system”, user authentication with groups, RSS feeds, blogging with an API and user created themes, forums, photo gallery with tagging, email and mailing list, XFN support, Google maps and Flickr API integration, and views for mobile devices. So, as you can see, you learn how to build just about everything a social site needs. The author does a good job of using leading edge features of Rails and web development in general to build the components for the site. One that I was very happy to see was REST or “Representational State Transfer”. Rails Restful Routes are used throughout the book and you soon learn to appreciate them as they further simplify the routing of requests from the view, through the controller, and to the model.

For the most part the end of each chapter has a substantial section devoted to testing what was implemented previously in the chapter. I was good to see this emphasis on unit and functional testing as I know what value it brings to the scalability and maintainability of an application. Plus it is so easy to write tests in Rails, there is little excuse not to do so.

After you’ve worked through the examples in the book and have a substantial, working social web app, the final chapter will lead you through the process of deploying your work to a production environment. This chapter is compact but certainly gets you enough info and pointers to get you deployed and into a strategy for scaling and optimizing.

Overall I really liked this book. It gets right down to business and utilizes many of the leading edge Rails best practices to get an impressive amount of work done in very short order, but this is Rails after all

OSCON 2007 Recap

Just finished up my 2007 ‘OSCON Experience‘ I attended the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday and we had our PDXPHP both in the exhibit hall as last year, but in addition I helped to organize the OSCamp room.

Spent most of my time in the exhibit hall this year. I only made it to one OSCON session + 2-3 OSCamp sessions. Still had a good time though. I was able to catch up with folks I typically only see at OSCON in addition to hanging out with local friends. There were no shortage of after parties this year. It seemed you had your pick of 3-4 parties a night. People were really zombiefied by the end of Thursday (I know I was).

OSL was nice enough to give a demo of the OLPC to the OSCAMP crowd. Getting the device (and Brad from OSL) out of the loud, crowded exhibit hall enabled the OSCamp’s to get a real close look at it and ask all the questions they wanted.