I spent last Friday in the mood of the innovation with a few other liipers. So we had all day long to explore a new technology, something we had never tried before. The main purpose of this hackday was to implement a simple REST API based on NodeJS providing a list of images taken randomly from the world wide web.
So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. Actually this was in very close proximity to where I grew up, which was nice as I was staying at my parents place. Usually staying there requires a one hour ride to the hipster areas of Berlin to attend a conference. In this case it was just a 2 stop U-Bahn ride. That being said, this wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.
Yesterday i tagged version Beta 1 of jackalope-jackrabbit, our PHP Content Repository (PHPCR) implementation. PHPCR is an API to manage tree-structured data, modelled after the Java Content Repository JCR specification. Time to summarize what jackalope can do today. For people already familiar with Jackalope, I summarize the recent changes at the bottom.
Responsive Web Design is, simply said, a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience. RWD makes a website easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling, across different browsers and platforms (desktop to tablets to phone) based on fluid grids, flexible images and media queries.
Previously, sites were chiefly designed for desktops. But the mobile web has became more popular. According to statistics the mobile internet is expected to overtake desktop internet usage this year. This makes it necessary to design websites that are flexible and can be viewed from almost any device.
I have been on the conference tour for quite some time now and on top of that I travel about every 2nd weekend to some frisbee tournament around the globe. Yet I have never visited the UK. So far the most I have seen of the UK was transiting via direct bus from one London airport to another. So I was quite thrilled when my talk about the Symfony2 CMF was accepted for PHPNE in Newcastle. I was also quite keen to learn more about the PHP community over there. At any rate I flew in on Monday evening and made my way to the hotel in a light drizzle which perfectly matched my image of UK weather. But even in the dark one could make out the historical feel to the architecture in the city center. I cut the sightseeing short and crashed into bed. Next day I made my way to the conference venue which was set at a movie theatre. There were countless busy bee's from the organization team and in general this conference was organized top notch. Quite an impressive achievement given that this was the very first PHPNE. The theatre also provided top notch projectors and of course comfy seats.
As you might know Liip is hiring. If not checkout http://liip.ch/jobs and see if you find something for you there. ProTip™: Bring beer if you get invited.
In January, Lukas wrote a collection of things left to do. Later I wrote a tentative release schedule that turned out to be too optimistic. I just updated that document with new dates. Sorry about this.
There are two actually quite cool reasons for the delays. One is that we had two projects at Liip where we had to integrate the CMF into existing projects. It was fun, but we found quite a lot of issues and missing features in Doctrine PHPCR-ODM that we fixed resp. implemented. (The Symfony2 Form component is incredibly powerful, but requires the persistance layer to work very exactly and we did not want any more workarounds and hacks to a achieve functionality.) The other reason is that many other people started using the CMF too. Some found issues that need to be fixed, others even managed to contribute fixes themselves - but which took time to review and comment on. Also, a lot of new features have been built or are currently being built.
This tuesday (tomorrow), the traditional Webtuesday will be held at the Liip Zurich office. Pierre Spring will talk about responsive design done responsibly. Liip will sponsor drinks and snacks. It starts as usual at 19:30. We're happy to welcome you.
Some little more info at the webtuesday web page
In vielen Firmen zeigt sich das Bild des Mitarbeitenden, der nur als Vollzeitbeschäftigter Karriereschritte machen kann. Teilzeit - gerade auch wenn für Kinderbetreuung eingesetzt - wird vom Arbeitgeber oft als zu kleines Engagement gewertet. Wir verstehen deshalb Angestellte in solchen Firmen, welche die Frage nach Teilzeit nur sehr zögernd oder vielleicht überhaupt nie stellen. Unsere Erfahrung zeigt, dass gelebte Teilzeitarbeit über verschiedene Funktionen und Rollen dazu führt, dass diese Furcht verschwindet. Wohl deshalb arbeiten bei uns weit über die Hälfte aller Mitarbeitenden Teilzeit (60% - 90%). Für unsere männlich dominierte Branche ist das bemerkenswert. Die Väter (und Mütter) betreuen am freien Tag ihre Kinder. Jüngere Kollegen ohne Kinder machen Ausbildungen oder gehen anderen Beschäftigungen nach.
Last thursday, i did the webinar about PHPCR and Magnolia CMS. You can download the slides or watch the recorded presentation (you need to register to see it). Thanks to all the attendees, I hope you enjoyed it.
There where some questions that i want to answer here on the blog to have the answers available to everybody.