My colleague Mike already posted about 2010 being a year of change for him and I feel similar in some respect. Some things have recently changed and I'm already quite happy with the changes so I'm sticking with them this year. It's a change in toolset for some of my tools, and more might be following.

As I mentioned, I have made some changes that are here for keeps. First of all, my main browser has switched to Google Chrome. I've found that for 99% of my browsing needs (both development and regular browsing), Google Chrome works very nice and is really fast. There's some bugs still, as Chrome is in beta for both operating systems I use (linux and OSX), but so far I'm really happy with it. I'm sticking to it for now.

Another tool that has changed is my IDE. I used to be a serious fan of Zend Studio. It started with Zend Studio 4 (IIRC), went through Zend Studio 5 and 5.5 and even after switching to the Eclipse platform (which took some getting used to), I stuck with the IDE. One thing I found though was that since the switch to Eclipse, the IDE was responding in a sluggish fashion. Things started to become slow. And let's not mention the "building workspaces" problem. I worked around some issues and stuck with the others, but was not feeling happy. As the new version of Netbeans IDE came out, with support for PHP and symfony integration, I was triggered to try it out. And wow, a good choice. Netbeans has very similar features to Eclipse (sometimes with the help of plugins for Eclipse), and also has a plugin architecture for even more features, but it responds blazingly fast, even on bigger projects. I might dedicate another blogpost to Netbeans soon, but for now let's just say that I'm really happy with having switched to this new IDE.

And more changes might be coming. After reading this article by Derick Rethans I might be checking out lighttpd soon as a replacement of Apache for webserver.

In the past months we've been making big steps at work in getting Scrum implemented for our project. We've come great ways but there's points up for improvement. One of the biggest points for improvement is my own understanding and overview of Scrum and the project. So I'm also going to focus on changing this by trying to focus more on keeping a good understanding of the project's state and how we can use Scrum to be even better at implementing features the right way in the right time.

The year is starting really well in terms of conferences. In the first three months of the year, I am attending and/or speaking at 4 conferences! We're starting at the end of this month with the conference I'm helping organizing, the PHPBenelux Conference 2010. I am not speaking at that one (too much stress organizing the whole thing) but it's going to be simply awesome!

About two weeks later I'm travelling to France, Paris to be exact. There will be the first english Symfony Live conference. The day before that conference, I'm doing a full-day tutorial on using symfony and Zend Framework together. I'm not doing this full-day training alone though, I will have a special guest. During the conference, I will speak on the symfony community. On how you can get help from it, and how you can help the community. I am really excited to be at this conference, and I'm looking forward to meeting many symfonians there.

Then two weeks later again, I'll be in London for this year's edition of the PHPUK conference. I am very happy to be accepted again to this conference, after speaking there last year as well. This year I'll be doing a brand new talk there on documentation and PHP titled "Would you like docs with that?". It will be an awesome conference, I already know that. I have many friends in the UK, and I'm seeing quite some great speakers on the schedule as well. 

Then last (for now) but not least, I am really excited to be speaking at the ConFoo conference in Montreal (Canada) this year. The conference seems to be huge, and one of the cool things of this conference is that it covers more than just PHP. I've found last year at the 4developers conference that it is very nice to talk to people who work with languages other than PHP every once in a while, and it can help bring the communities together as well. Plus, it allows me to hopefully meet many of the north-american community again, especially since I'm not attending PHP|tek this year.

There's new versions all around this year. We'll have to wait until the end of the year, but both symfony and Zend Framework are expecting to release version 2.0 by the end of the year. I'm really looking forward to both. 

Aside from this, I have some interesting things going. Of course I'm still involved in PHPBenelux, and I always have tons of hobby projects going on, but one of the most important things for me this year is the fact that I'm also the Community Manager for symfony. I have some interesting plans that I want to work on, either handed to me by members of the community (thanks!) or that just came up in my own mind. I hope to make things even better for the community than things already are.

This year will be awesome!