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Valuable Lessons, Celebrations and Philosophy

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Pro PHP Podcast Progress

I’m overwhelmed by the support of the first podcast. I want to thank everyone who took the time to listen, offer support and diss the music choice :) . You all are awesome.

To catch you up on where the podcast has gone in a week:

  • The Bandwidth blew my little Linode instance away in 36 hours, so Enygma at PHPDeveloper.net was gracious enough to offer hosting for the podcast. I believe it had been listened to 700 times before moving to his server, and over 500 times since moving
  • Engyma also was cool enough to make a logo which can be seen at http://www.pro-php.com
  • I asked Chris Shiflett to help out with a short segment each week. He, in typical form, put it out on his blog to see if the idea was worthwhile. Every comment assured him it was. We are scheduled to record the first segment of “Safe In Sound” this evening which is proudly brought to you by BrainBulb, the PHP Consultancy
  • I reached out to the list of folks I mentioned having an interest in interviewing. The majority responded with a positive response. I think that Wez Furlong was both most enthusiastic and most available so I plan of hooking up with him first, like tonight or tomorrow if possible. This will be great since I just finished the latest installment of “PHP 5 Tried For You” for International PHP Magazine on his PECL::Event package, and I have some questions for him regarding that, PDO and some other stuff he’s working on
  • I’m looking for someone to help compile a weekly summary of PHPPEAR/PECL events. I reached out to Elizabeth Naramore, who was very gracious but is bound to her gig at PHPbuilder.net at present. That may still work out in a cooperative between the podcast and PHPBuilder, but in the event it doesn’t… anyone who wants to contribute there and would even like to record their segment please contact me at podcast - AT - pro-php.com
  • We are now listed at Podcast Alley. Thanks to those who’ve voted. It’s a hastle, I know… but it’s the equivalent of Armitron for podcasting. If you can, take a minute and vote for us.
  • The comments and support were just so encouraging. Thank you all, it really helps to know you all are behind this.

So.. that’s the deal. The next show will hopefully be ready by Thursday. I’m working on building a steady schedule with all the peeps as well as gearing up some new music :)

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31 May 2005 comments [2] TrackBack-URI

The First All PHP Podcast Is Now Live

Wow. That was fun. If you don’t know what a podcast is… go here: Podcast Alley / iPodder

I started an all PHP focused podcast. I think the proposed format is pretty good. Rather than try to explain it, I’d just ask you to listen to it. Lots of props to LoudBlog.

Please let me know what you think. I know, I’m running my mouth.

- M

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24 May 2005 comments [5] TrackBack-URI

Blog Nashville: What Happened While I Was There

K, this is old news, I know. I intentionally didn’t post about BlogNashville right away because I didn’t want to be emotional about it. I wanted to have a long range perspective on how I enjoyed the day, and I can honestly say I did. I really enjoyed it. It was free, I had nothing better to do and listening to Henry Copeland, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Winer and Rex Hammond in person was interesting at least and very educational and inspirational at best. I met some really cool people that I shared the day with, and more than anything I was properly educated on the art and legalities of Podcasting. All I have to say is I’m dumping a grand or so into my studio and getting ready to do some things. :)

The making money session made me feel really good. Most of these people didn’t have a real good idea on how to make money from Blogs. Instapundit and a few others did. Henry is doing pretty well. But most people were fishing for a buck. Kinda funny. I feel pretty good about my understanding of how to monetize RSS and its sister technologies, especially after that session. I got taped and filmed speaking, maybe I’ll make the documentary. The City Paper called me at work to speak about my thoughts on Blogs and money a few days later. Don’t know if it made print.

Interesting to see that TypePad (at least by the time of the conference) hasn’t made PodCasting simple. Also… it’s interesting how misunderstood PodCasting is, even by those in the “tech aware” community. I’m glad I’m as aware as I am now. Almost missed the boat.

So, thanks to those who put it on. Knowledge is infinite, you just gotta get off your ass and get some.

-M

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16 May 2005 comment TrackBack-URI

Interviews with Tech Heads at SugarCRM, PriceGrabber and United Press International about Enterprise PHP Development

I’ve had a pretty amazing two weeks. My apologies for not posting more. I’ll dump some stuff now.

One of the amazing things that’s happened is that I fulfilled the task of interviewing head programmers at three major information technology companies utilizing PHP in enterprise development and centering there efforts on PHP 5. Zend is going to do a webcast where you can see and hear them all, which I would recommend, and I had the pleasure of interviewing them all for PHP Solutions. Really interesting stuff. Jacob Taylor, Vice President of Engineering at SugarCRM has lead a team that has literally worked wonders in the last year. Have you seen their site lately? Better yet their app or their diverse business model? It’s amazing to think that a virtual start-up can support that kind of product offering within their first year of operations. They are so pumped about PHP 5 and what it means to the speed and strength of their development cycles. I agreed with him in many ways and found that we run our show in much the same way. One thing he noted was that they use Zend Studio and Platform in development and production and how it helps their QA process in ways that they can’t replicate on their own. After evaluating the Platform I’d have to agree, the alert management and introspection is just really efficient and runs in production helping you to debug an application in ways you couldn’t have done otherwise, at least not without coding a Platform-like application yourself.

Also spoke to Dominique Jean, head of Technology at PriceGrabber. I had no idea how important this was. PriceGrabber is a great application. And it’s been run on PHP since PHP 3. It’s fast, works well and is intuitive. I guess I was just so impressed by how long they had been using PHP in the Enterprise. Kinda makes all the talk about PHP in the Enterprise sound stupid. If you have talented PHP coders, you can work wonders and make money. These guys also used Zend Studio.

Maybe the one that I most identified with from my experience was my interview with Kyle Berletsen, Sr. Web Applications Engineer at UPI. His team is moving from ColdFusion to PHP4 and in the architecture phase of a PHP 5 overhaul of everything. I have had a lot of old-school CF experience from my days at HealthStream, and making the transition from CF to PHP was definitely revolutionary for me. Now, lots of folks have a prejudice against CF, and from a syntax standpoint I can understand that. However, CF was really a great boilerplate for a lot of the good template engines and component engines out there today. Having said that, PHP is free, powerful and has really pretty syntax compared to CF, so it wins. Kyle seems really happy to be moving from CF to PHP 4, and discovering where PHP 5 can take their application. They’re using Studio and Platform as well, and are happy with the combo and what it’s doing for them.

This article will be in the next issue of PHP Solutions magazine. It was fun, thanks to everyone for allowing me the interview.

- M

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