Tag Archives: manchester

Think inside the box

Earlier Steve Daniels sent me a link to a BBC Manchester news story about offices made out of shipping containers. Long time readers may recall that I have a bit of a thing about using shipping containers for interesting purposes so it’s worth a read read:

“These are new shipping containers where, in very simple terms, we’ve taken the front of the container off and we’ve put a glass screen in with glass doors.

“We’ve fitted them out with carpet and supply power and broadband connectivity and the tenants bring their own furniture – very simple and very affordable.”

Creative commons photos by James K Thorp

PHP North West Conference 2009

Last year, Andy and I attended the first Annual PHP North West Conference. Well it’s back for PHPNW2009 next month – Saturday 10th October with extra stuff happening Friday evening and Sunday morning – at the Manchester Conference Centre. This year there will be a few of us attending from Web Services allowing us to cover more of the conference sessions in more detail.

I also found out a couple of weeks ago that my session proposal was accepted so I’ll be speaking about “Building an Anti-CMS (and how it’s changed our web team)”. What exactly this consists of will be decided on a two hour train journey to London next week but the abstract obviously sounded good!

As with last year, they’re offering concession tickets to students so I recommend anyone studying Web Systems Development or other Computing courses try to head over to Manchester and check it out – there’s a load of well known speakers (and me!) covering everything from PHP frameworks (Zend, Yii and Symfony all covered) to tools to programming best practices.

If you’re at Edge Hill and are going let me know and I’ll catch you in Manchester!

h ttp://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw09/

PHP North West Conference Review

Dangerously close to going the whole of November without a blog post so I thought I’d catch up with a quick review of the PHP North West conference last weekend.

London has had a conference for a number of years so it was about time there was one up here so myself and Andy made the trip into Manchester to take part. The conference was organised by a few people from the PHPNW user group but it was better run than most “commercial” conferences I’ve been to.

Welcome Keynote: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) – Derick Rethans

I must admit I wasn’t too impressed by this. At times it came across as a bit of a rant towards certain technologies without going into details about when they might be of use. For example sIFR was shown with a buggy version of AdBlock where it didn’t show any headings – yes, potentially a problem but for some it may be worth the risk.

MySQL EXPLAIN Explained – Adrian Hardy

Very good session giving an overview of how to use the EXPLAIN command to find out what MySQL is doing and help optimise your queries.

Regular Expression Basics – Ciarán Walsh

Basic introduction to regexps. I’m still looking for a text editor that supports perl style regular expressions in a logical way – Notepad++ does very odd things with line endings.

Index and Search, options for PHP programmers – Zoe Slattery

I think some people were expecting more of an introduction on how to use Lucene to add a search engine into your site but I found it really interesting. My two take-home points:

Lucene on Java + JIT is 50 times faster than Zend Lucene!
Java Lucene has a cool standard analyser – picks out things like email addresses and company names like “AT&T”

The Power of Refactoring – Stefan Koopmanschap

We should do more test. Really.

Twittex: From idea to live in 7 days – Stuart Herbert

Following Twitter’s announcement that they’d be stopping SMS delivery of updates to UK users, Gradwell spent a week working on a system to fill the gap. The result maybe wasn’t as popular as they’d hoped but the experience seemed invaluble. It’s a lot like Bath Web Services’ Get Creative Week.

Panel Discussion: State of the community – Ivo Jansch, Steph Fox, Scott MacVicar and Felix De Vliegher

The conference ended with a panel discussion. Maybe not of immediate relevant to the work we do but everything talked about with trickle through.

I’ll leave it at that. Congratulations to the organisers on a great event.

Image by skoop.

PHP North West Conference

London has had a PHP conference running for a number of years – Andy and I attended the last one in February this year – but there’s not been anything up North so far. That’s all about to change with the creation of PHPNW and the announcement of the first (of many?!) PHP North West Conference to be held in the conference-centre-formally-known-as-GMEX (Manchester Central) on Saturday 22nd November.

Lorna Mitchell does a much better job of explaining it than I could:

Lorna Mitchell – PHP North West from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

Something that might be of interest to our students is that there will be a number of concessionary tickets available so keep an eye out on the conference website for when tickets are released.

I also popped into Manchester on Tuesday to go to the PHPNW meetup – a chance for PHP developers from across the region to get together and chat. This time as well as a quick update about the conference, there was a short presentation about version control systems. This is something we already do using subversion but it was interesting to see nontheless.

Anyway, it’s good to see the North West tech community continue to grow and I’m looking forward to going to PHP North West Conference 2008.