Web & PHP Magazine marches into the sunset

Sad news: this month’s issue of Web & PHP Magazine will be its last ever. It’s been a fantastic couple of years, but all good things must come to an end, and we will no longer be publishing as of 2014.

If it’s any consolation, this final issue is (I think) the best we’ve ever produced, with incredible articles from Benjamin Greenaway, Julien Pauli, Ben Straub, Kagnar Kurm, Sebastian Bergmann and Joey Rivera. And check out that awesome cover!

As for me, I’ll be moving full-time to our parent company S&S Media’s Java site JAXenter.com, bringing along some of Web & PHP’s regular writers. I’ve really enjoyed editing Web & PHP Magazine for the past eight months – and most of all, being part of the incredible PHP community. Thanks for having me.

Elliot Bentley, Editor

Photo by Flickr user Meaduva.

Win tickets to Percona Live London

As part of our preview of Percona Live London in the October issue of Web & PHP Magazine, we’re giving away a pair of tickets to one lucky reader. The annual MySQL fest takes place November 11–12 at the Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre (near Gloucester Road Underground Station). Please note that these tickets do not include transport or accommodation, so make sure you have a travel plan before you enter!

To be in for a chance to win, just email elliotb@webandphp.com with the subject line “Percona Live Competition” before the deadline of 2pm 11pm (UK time) on October 15. We’ll contact the winner later that same week.

Even if you don’t win, how’s this a commiseration prize: W&P readers can get £25 off their tickets by entering the promotional code PHP-UK at the checkout!

Web & PHP Con 2013: That’s a wrap!

After months of planning, this week saw the first ever Web & PHP Conference take place in San Jose, CA. We set out to establish a new breed of open-access developer conference, and we’re pleased to say it was a resounding success, with over 300 attendees travelling in from all over the world.

They were treated to keynote presentations by Sebastian Bergmann, Frederic Harper, Evan Coury and Jonathan LeBlanc, and technical sessions from a wide range of experts from web technologies and PHP development realms, including Jeremy Lindblom, Ben Straub, David Stockton, Jeremy Mikola, Sharon Levy and Wim Godden (to name just a few of our incredible speakers).

On the Monday, attendees got hands-on personal tutelage from webdev gurus, including thePHP.cc trio Arne Blankerts, Sebastian Bergmann and Stefan Priebsch. Jeremy Mikola and Jen Kramer also ran practical introductions to MongoDB and Bootstrap.

Of course, the event wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our sponsors, so a massive thanks goes to Compuware, thePHP.cc, JetBrains, MySQL, Developer.Press and Conferences.IO.

We hope that you all had as much fun as we did, and we’ll be back with more Web & PHP Con in 2014! In the meantime, you can get your Web & PHP fix from our free digital magazine, published every month with expert advice and handy tutorials.

Paypal’s Jonathan LeBlanc chats about taking chances and code beginnings

Web & PHP Conference 2013 is finally here! With our Workshops kicking off today and the free expo and conference kicking off tomorrow. We spoke to Paypal’s Principal Developer Evangelist and Web & PHP speaker Jonathan LeBlanc and got some interesting responses with our Web & PHP interview questionnaire! 

 

Jonathan LeBlanc is a technology evangelist, Emmy award winning software engineer, and author of the O’Reilly book “Programming Social Applications”. Specializing in user identity concepts and data mining techniques, as well as open source initiatives around social engagement, Jonathan works on the development of emerging initiatives towards building a more user-centric web.

W&P – Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140 characters.
JL – We’ll learn how identity and personalization are playing pivotal roles in everything we do online, and how to begin using that ourselves

W&P – How did you first get involved in coding?
JL – It’s not as exciting as most developer stories. I first started coding in high school when I took a class in Basic. Around that same time I was building websites for fun and teaching myself from the source code of other sites I liked. It wasn’t really until I left college degree paths in fine arts and classical studies, and pursued a degree in computer science that I found my passion for development.

W&P – What advice would you give aspiring web developers?
JL – Take chances and suck in as much knowledge as you can from others. The best way to grow in the field is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you are and listen / be involved in as much as you can until your skills are on par with their own.

W&P – Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?
JL – The people that I most admire, or enjoy surrounding myself with, are those who truly see our industry as both a career and a passion, instead of a clock in and clock out job. I feel that people with this drive are those that can truly affect change, and push our industry to whole new levels.

W&P – If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead) who would it be?
JL – Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci (a big table of awesome)

W&P – Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.
JL – Definitely a horse-sized duck. If you’re fighting 100 duck-sized horses you will eventually miscount and think you’ve won, then as you’re taking your victory lap, POW, right in the kisser.

W&P – What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?
JL – Besides seeing more of the community and getting a sense of where the collective industry is trending towards, I want to see the innovation coming from companies, startups and developers, those that are breaking the typical models of technology implementation.

“I say neigh, don’t egg them on.”

The countdown to Web & PHP Con 2013 is on! There’s less than 2 weeks to go before we descend upon San Jose Convention Centre, CA, to bring you the latest in cutting-edge practices from the industry’s top web developers. Talking of the industry’s top web developers…over the last couple of weeks we have been running short Q&A’s with our speakers in order to get to know them a little better and find out a bit more about their session.

Today is the turn of Mike Stowe.

Mike is a professional software engineer, PHP 5.3 Zend Certified, and has over 10 years of PHP hacking experience. In those 10 years he as had the privilege of building numerous websites and applications, including applications for the medical field, law enforcement, one of the leading audio and lighting dealers, large and small non-profits, and numerous industrial companies. He has also spoken at numerous conferences, published multiple articles on PHP and security, is an active member of OWASP, and helps organize MNPHP, Twin Cities Software Engineers, and the MidwestPHP Conference. He currently work at Constant Contact as a Developer Advocate, representing developers and their needs within the company.

1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140 characters.  

An introduction to Agile methodologies in the workplace and a look at some of the benefits and challenges of Agile

2. How did you first get involved in coding?

I was a sports guy who ended up having a knee injury…so instead of basketball practice I found myself on the computer creating a personal webpage using a free service called HotYellow98… but I wanted to do more, so ended up looking at this thing called HTML, and well, I was hooked.

3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

Get involved and go for it. There are a lot of great developers out there who are more than willing to help you out. Join a user group, join the mailing lists, and experiment with your code. It’s ok to make mistakes, you’ll learn a lot more that way. Push your skills to the edge every single day.

4. Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?

This list would go on way too long… there are a lot of great people in the tech community who have really helped me out. But a big shout out to the local user group organizers and conference leaders, I don’t think people know how much work it is to put on these events and keep them going. Also a shout out to the speakers who give up their time to go out and share their knowledge with others.

5. If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead) who would it be?

I would love to have done dinner with Steve Jobs… but who wouldn’t have lol. Also wouldn’t mind talking with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

6.Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

I say neigh, don’t egg them on. (hey, had to have a pun somewhere).
7. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?

Meeting a lot of great developers and getting to learn what people are doing in the industry.

 

Mike Stowe will be down at Web & PHP Con this September 16 -18 in San Jose, CA giving his talk on ‘Agile in the Workplace’.You can attend this talk and all of our other sessions and keynotes for free! Just register on the website.

Laughter, tears, and time travel.

Wow! There’s less than 2 weeks before Web & PHP Con descends upon San Jose, CA. It’s hard to believe it’s come around so soon! And we still have a few speakers still to get through. So let’s get to it. Next up we have Ben Straub who keeps it short and sweet.

Ben has always been a programmer, and loves making things work. He’s a maintainer of libgit2, an api-focused implementation of git internals.

1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140 characters.  

Level up your git game with Ben Straub from GitHub. There will be laughter, tears, and time travel. Bring clean water.

2. How did you first get involved in coding?

My dad bought us a Commodore 64 when I was 9 or 10, and I couldn’t help myself.

3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

Make sure you learn something new every day.

4. Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?

People who have created popular frameworks, mostly. DHH, Mark Otto, Steve Sanderson. It’s because they not only solved their immediate problem, they solved it in such a way as to make that problem completely go away for thousands of others.

5. If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead) who would it be?

I really want to pick heavy intellectuals, but I think that Louis C. K., Zach Galifianakis, and Russell Brand would provide me with gut-busting laughter for a few months afterward.

6.Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

100 tiny horses. They can’t climb, so I could pick them off from the top of a big rock. Plus, they’d be SO cute.

7. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?

Meeting interesting people and finding out what they’re working on.

Ben will be down at Web & PHP Con giving his talk on ‘Git (and GitHub) for Ninjas’. Remember, you can see his talk along with the rest of our great line up for FREE!

Whittled Down

And so it continues. We have less than 3 weeks left before the Web & PHP Conference comes to town and still so many speakers that we still need to introduce you to. So no time to be messing around – let’s get straight to it with Dustin Whittle!

Dustin Whittle is a Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics where he focuses on helping organizations manage application performance. Before joining AppDynamics, Dustin was CTO at Kwarter, a consultant at SensioLabs, and developer evangelist at Yahoo!. He has experience building and leading engineering teams and working with developers and partners to scale to meet demand. When Dustin isn’t working he enjoys flying, sailing, diving, golfing, and travelling around the world. Find out more at dustinwhittle.com.

1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140 characters.

Attendees will leave with the knowledge to scale and load test their next PHP web application.

2. How did you first get involved in coding?

BBS era. I started when I was young and it just evolved from there. At first I just wanted to learn how to make my own web site.

3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

Get active on github and find an open source project you are passionate about. Always remember that you still have a lot to learn — no matter whether you just got started or you have been a professional developer for a decade.

4. Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?

@mojombo — For building GitHub from nothing and turning it into a real business that powers so many projects.

@fabpot — For teaching me how to write PHP properly and pushing the PHP community forward.

and a thousand others who have been helpful in making me a better engineer.

5. If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead) who would it be?

Barack Obama

Shawn Carter (Jay-Z)

Steve Jobs

6.Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

I would rather fight one horse-sized duck. The bigger they are the harder they fall.

7. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?

Getting to know the amazing community that has evolved in the PHP And Javascript worlds over the last few years.

Dustin Whittle will be down at Web & PHP Con 2013 giving 2 talks:

Scaling PHP in the real world!

Your Agile Performance Testing Checklist: MultiMechanize, Bees with Machine Guns, PageSpeed and AppDynamics

Remember guys, you can check these and more awesome sessions all for FREE! Free as a bird! Just register here.

Knowing me, knowing you – A ha!

Over the last few weeks we’ve been making it our mission to get more information and gossip on our Web & PHP Con speakers. We know they’re an awesome bunch but we wanted to make sure you knew that too…and let you know what you have in store at one of their sessions!

So today is the turn of Joshua Thijssen.

Joshua Thijssen is a freelance consultant, systems administrator and developer. His passion lies in designing and working with complex projects, working on high scalability and availability projects and helping other to achieve higher standards in both coding and thinking. He’s the author of the upcoming book “Mastering the
SPL library”, lead developer of the upcoming web language “Saffire” and is regular speaker on both web development and system administration conferences.1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con.

I’ll be talking about public key encryption. I will show you how simple
math helps keeping our world-economy afloat and how it can help you
secure your own data. Furthermore I will be talking about how we can
quickly find issues on a (production) server that is on fire (not
literally, obviously). Rumors have it that my talks might be accompanied
by big sound & light shows, a ticker-tape parade and special guest
appearances by unicorns and rainbows (not yet confirmed though).

2. How did you first get involved in coding?

When I was 5 or 6 on a C64 in Basic and very quickly later on in
assembler. With the help of dad, programming simple applications. Pretty
much stopped playing games, and started to create them myself.

3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

RUN AWAY!  But really: don’t focus too much on one single framework, on
just doing wordpress or just doing jquery. Focus on the WEB as a whole:
the languages (not only php), the infrastructure, the tools, the
scalability, the protocols. Know how the system you are building works
with the rest the web and eventually this will result in you writing
better and more robust applications and sites.

4. Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?

Not particularly one person, but I admire everybody with a passion for tech.

 5. If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead)
 who would it be?

Linus Torvalds (living) – Einstein (dead) – Schrodinger’s cat (living
AND dead)

6.Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Explain your reasoning.

100 duck-sized horses obviously. It’s easier to outrun tiny-legged horses.

7. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?

Meeting new (and old) friends from all over the world, plus: free buffet!

Joshua will be presenting 3 sessions at Web & PHP Con:

Alice & Bob: Public key cryptography 101
(re)discovering the SPL
Don’t reboot, debug!

(And remember, you can check out all of these talks and more, absolutely FREE. Just register for your place here.)

Ducks and unicorns and gnomes, oh my!

So for the past few weeks we’ve been getting to know a little more about our amazing speakers who are headlining our Web & PHP Conference this September in San Jose. Today, it’s time to get to know Frédéric Harper.

So without further ado…

In the IT world for more than 10 years, Frédéric Harper started as a developer working with different technologies focusing on Web, and mobile development. One day, Frédéric got a revelation, and decided to use his social skills to be an Evangelist. He spent a few years showing the Openness of Microsoft talking about Open Source, Web standards, and Interoperability. Now, as a Senior Technical Evangelist at Mozilla, Fred shares his passion about the Open Web, and help developers be successful with Firefox OS. Experienced speaker, t-shirts wearer, long-time blogger, passionate hugger, and HTML5 lover, Fred live in Montréal, and speak Frenglish. Always conscious about the importance of unicorns, and gnomes, you can read about these topics, and other thoughts on his website.

1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140 characters.
You’ll go out from my sessions with a new way of thinking about the Web, and how you’ll build your websites as your web applications.
2.How did you first get involved in coding?
I started with scripting for an IRC client on Windows, mIRC. I wanted to customize the default behaviour, add features, and be able to create something.
3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

Practice, and avoid copy pasting from solution you found on the Web! You will be good by trying, failing, learning, and by continuing to create sites or applications.
4.Which individuals do you most admire in the tech world and why?
If I have to choose one, I would say Jeffrey Zeldman. I like Web Standards, and Jeffrey is the Godfather of Web Standards. I also like he can manage to have a Web design business, started A List Apart, a Book Apart, an Event Apart, and still find time to speak at conferences. I saw one of his talks, and it’s always insightful.
5.If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead) who would it be?
Mickael Jackson, because I’m a big music fan, and he is still the king of pop. Tim Berners-Lee because the Web is an entire part of my life. The last one would be Matt Groening because of Spider Pig, heu, I mean, The Simpsons.
6.Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.
I would prefer to fight one horse-sized duck as there me be a way for me to defeat it or at least… I would be able to run! With 100 ducks, they can team-up together to defeat me, and it may be harder to run…
7. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?
People! It’s always the part of a conference I’m constantly looking for. I like to watch amazing presentations, and share my passion with others, but for me, connecting with people, and creating new relationship it’s amazing.

 

Frédéric will be at Web & PHP Con presenting two sessions: Responsive Web Design, get the best of your design and Mobile First. Remember, you can see him and all our other great speakers absolutely FREE! Just make sure to register for your place.

Go forth and experiment!

Today we’re getting to know more about Sebastian Bergmann…no, not the main character from the Swedish police drama now being shown on BBC4 …but one of the speakers who will be down at Web & PHP Con 2013. With less than a month to go before the conference we thought it would be a good idea to get to know a little more about our speakers and what they will have in store for you during their sessions. So let’s get to it…

Sebastian Bergmann is a mastermind of PHP development and PHP quality assurance. He has instrumentally contributed to tranforming PHP into a reliable platform for large-scale, critical projects. Companies and PHP developers around the world benefit from the tools that he has written.

1. Describe what we can expect from your talk at Web & PHP Con in 140
  characters.

I have a workshop,a keynote, and a session. I don’t know how to describe them all in 140
characters!

2. How did you first get involved in coding?

I wrote my first program on an Amiga 500 in AmigaBASIC when I was
twelve years old. AmigaBASIC quickly made way for Assember and C.
Most of my programming on the Amiga, however, was in ARexx. Soon after
I got my first X86-based PC in the late 90s a former contact from
within the Amiga Scene asked me to help with a dynamic website. He
gave me the choice between Perl and PHP both of which I had no
knowledge of. I briefly looked at Perl, discared it quickly, and
fell in love with PHP. The rest is history, I guess.

3.What advice would you give aspiring web developers?

Alan J. Perlis said “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think
about programming, is not worth knowing.” So go forth and experiment
with different programming languages and don’t be religious about them
(or frameworks). Look beyond the syntax and understand unique concepts.

4. If you could have 3 famous people round for dinner (living or dead)
 who would it be?

Alexander von Humboldt, Konrad Zuse, Alan Kay

5. Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
 Explain your reasoning.

When my busy schedule allows it, I play World of Warcraft and raid
with my guild. During most raid encounters you have to deal with one big
enemy and once in a while with many small enemies. Since I am playing
a healer my job is to prevent my team mates from dying. That means I
do not care all that much about whether they are fighting a horse-sized
duck or 100 duck-sized horses.

6. What are you most looking forward to at Web & PHP Con?

The hallway track! Every PHP conference is a gathering of the PHP
community. I love to catch up with friends old and new to exchange
ideas.