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http://blog.phpdeveloper.org/?p=494

After reading through his “Confessions of a Public Speaker” (as a beginning speaker, I learned some good things from this one – I’d suggest it if you do any kind of speaking) I was anxious to check out some of Scott Berkun’s other books. The topics of some of the others didn’t really appeal to me, but the one that’s caught my attention recently is his “Myths of Innovation” book. I’m maybe a third of the way through it right now, and there’s one thing that keeps resonating in my mind as I go through it. In a previous chapter, he makes the point that innovation, despite what the history books and popular culture would have us assume – it’s less of an “Ah-hah!” and more of a “Finally!”.

See, most of the common stories of innovators out there leave out something that’s very important – the reference frame of their lives. They don’t provide a larger picture of who someone is (like Einstein or Newton) and how all of their work, everything they’ve done in their career led up to the discoveries that they’re known for.

I think this is important to remember as software developers, too. All of us start projects and never finish them, it’s just a fact of life in the world of a coder. We find something that we either think is the “Next Big Idea” or something that we’ll find amazingly useful and latch onto it, giving it our all for a week, maybe a month. Nine times out of ten, though, that project falls by the wayside. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s some folks out there that do a great job with anything they touch, but for the average developer, it’s all about hacking away at the latest “shiny”.

Sometimes it’s about the technology (“everyone’s learning Backbone.js, why shouldn’t I?”) and other times there’s a bit of pride that kicks in (“I could do this so much better if…”) but there’s always one thing to remember. It doesn’t matter if the project you’re working on goes anywhere. Remember this. Just like some of the great innovators of the past, it takes a lot of dedication and work to get to be the “Ah-hah Guy” that wows the world with something new and amazing. Don’t forget that the code of the Next Great App isn’t just going to fly from your fingertips.

Work hard at your craft and it will pay off. Maybe not in fame and glory, maybe in making real, useful contributions to the culture and technology around you. Don’t stop trying to innovate, don’t focus on the failures and, above all, keep learning and keep doing.

http://brian.moonspot.net/php-coding-standards

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 952 bytes)

http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/phorkie-0.2.0.htm

http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/05/open-standards-better-way.html

http://feeds.liip.ch/~r/liip_blog_php/~3/GLV2QTdyOrs/jsday-phpday-2012-verona.html

From May 16th to May 19th the latest edition of jsDay and phpDay took place in Verona, Italy. Both are two-day conferences, the first one centered around JavaScript, the second around PHP (obviously). They are organised by the community (Grusp) which means they are much more focused on technology than on marketing. A number of Liipers were attending one or both conferences and some where even giving talks.

jsDay

JsDay directly started with a mindblowing talk by Mark Boas (The slides can be found here). He demonstrated his technique called "hyperaudio" which he uses to enhance audio content on the web with semantic information. Doing so he makes the audio content both crawlable by bots and accessible by visually impaired people. Also this technique gives great possibilities in terms of user interaction: It gets possible to highlight the currently spoken words, to spool exactly to a certain word or to switch the language of an audio file while it is playing.

Another highlight of jsDay clearly was JavaScript messiah Douglas Crockfords Keynote. He spoke about the functionality of our brain and why it makes it so hard for us to step away from subjective criteria when it comes to programming style.

In general the trends in the JavaScript world are all around emerging technologies like in browser data storage, 3D CSS transformations and the yet not mature native audio / video handling. A big topic was node.js which had a handful of talks devoted to it. Another trend in the JS microcosmos is the movement from simple libraries to ingenious JavaScript frameworks, as client heavy applications grow more and more complex.

phpDay

There have been a lot of interesting talks by people from the PHP community. The spectrum of talks covered a lot of ground, from highly technical aspects like how to build PHP extensions to more social or organisational aspects with talks about agile workflow and team communication. Below you find a list of the most remarkable talks:

• Mastering PHP Data Structure 102 by Patrick Allaert
• Step by Step: Making a website fly with Assetic, Varnish and ESI by David Buchmann (Liip)
• Security at scale: Web application security in continuous deployment environments by Zane Lackey
• Symfony CMF by Jacopo Romei
• PHP in 2012: Keynote by PHP father Rasmus Lerdorf
• PHPCR - PHP Content Repository Specification by Lukas Smith (Liip)
• Best Practice in API Design by Lorna Jane Mitchell
• A Practical Look At Symfony2 by Stefan Koopmanschap
• Dependency Management with Composer by Jordi Boggiano
• Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful Web Services by David Zülke
• And of course the really entertaining closing keynote of David Coallier

Sum-Up

As always at conferences, a lot of interesting talks also happened at the infamous 'hallway track' and at the social events where we met many interesting people from all Europe and the states. The conference was really well organised by Grusp and the talks were well balanced.

At the social event on the phpDay we made a picture of all attending Liipers. Unfortunately Mirco wasn't around so Derick Rethans (!!) kindly agreed to play the body double for him :-)

The next jsDay/phpDay will take place again next year from May 16th to 19th. We really recommend to go to at least one of the conferences if not both. If you go you'd do well to reserve some time to visit the beautiful city of Verona.

Notice

Unfortunately, during the end of our stay two major incidents occurred in Italy which shocked the whole country. Our thoughts go out to all the people affected by those tragedies.

http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/05/dont-be-stupid-grasp-solid-slides.html

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/publication-standards-part-2-a-standard-future/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/publication-standards-part-1-the-fragmented-present/