A look back

As I did last year, I wanted to have a look at this year. This year was quite the year for me, with the birth of our second child, a lot of conferences, the reviving of the dutch PHP Usergroup and new symfony versions.

January

January my focus was mainly on the birth of Yara. A great experience of course, something truely special. It was also the month my podcast introducing symfony was published on the Zend DevZone though, and the month I received my Zend PHP5 certificate.

February

In February, I shared my experiences with the new Zend Studio for Eclipse, and also looked forward to the Dutch PHP Conference. 

March

In March I published a post listing some tips for people beginning with symfony, which I got a lot of positive response about. I also found a great quote in a strategy guide for World of Warcraft that could just as easily be applied to (PHP) development.

April

April was a busy month for me. In april I did the first two of my conference presentations in the Netherlands. Both were on symfony, and were greated with positive response. Later in the month I enjoyed the company of some cool people from the PHP world, first for a dinner and then for a seminar.

May

In May my article The Power Of Refactoring was published on the Ibuildings weblog. This article triggered my preparations for the talk I'd end up giving at several conferences later in the year. It was also the month in which Ibuildings and PHP|architect announced ther partnership. And last but not least, I found out about an interesting gotcha when using SimpleXML with XML that has namespaces in it.

June

June was of course the month of the Dutch PHP Conference, where I joined Fabien Potencier of symfony in a full-day workshop. The month ended with Live concerts.

July

In July I guess I was quite busy, because I only wrote 3 posts on my weblog. One of them was quite funny, and that was my quoting of Ivo Jansch talking about the atkMetaNode and comparing it to pregnancy.

August

In August I came by a really good plugin for symfony, at least for plugin development, called DbFinderPlugin. Using this plugin you don't need to manage different versions of your plugins anymore for different ORMs, which is really good. I also announced two new speaking engagements, a talk at SymfonyCamp and a talk at the International PHP Conference.

September

The Center of Expertise was announced by Ibuildings in September, something I was quite excited about. It was the month of SymfonyCamp 2008 where I did a presentation on debugging with symfony. I also announced yet another speaking engagement, this time in Manchester at the PHPNW08 conference. However, probablythe most exciting news was that the earlier announced Center of Expertise was going to be led by none other than Cal Evans.

October

In October we announced the first BugHuntDay, an initiative of the Dutch and Belgian PHP usergroups. I also gave a little insight into a project of mine, integration the lime unit testing framework and phpUnderControl. After this the work on that slowed a bit, but I hope to pick up on that early next year. October was also the month of the International PHP Conference and my presentation there. 

November

November was the month of the Zend Framework BugHuntDay. It was a huge success. It was also the month of PHPNW08 and my presentation there. Another event where I had a lot of fun.

December

Finally, December. There's two days left, but I don't think I'll write much in those two days It was a busy month, with symfony 1.2 and Jobeet going on. Having to let go of our 7 year old cat Indy was not easy either. All in all, this was probably the most hectic month of the year.

Next year

Next year I hope to continue my conference activity. I've already got proposals in at PHPLondon and PHP|tek (both of which I hope will announce their schedules before the end of the year), and I've already been accepted at the PHPCon Italia. I'll be sending proposals to various other conferences as well. I've got plans for a book, which I hope will become more clear during the year. Of course, my involvement in the symfony community will stay, and the Dutch PHP Usergroup will become even more active next year. Enough to look forward to. Have a great new year everyone!