phpBB and Symfony: Combining Communities

Earlier this year at the Symfony Live event in Paris, I spoke with Nils Adermann, the new lead developer of the phpBB software. At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.

Contributing to Open Source

Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.

Open Source Your Career, my story

About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.

An Open Letter To The phpBB Community

The past week was the week of Symfony Live 2010 in Paris. One of the people there was Nils Adermann, the new Lead Developer of the phpBB project. The biggest news was that phpBB is considering moving to Symfony 2 as the basis of their new version of phpBB: phpBB4. As a result of this conference, Nils Adermann posted an RFC for this. This is my response, which I post here as an open letter to the phpBB community as well as in the thread where the RFC is being discussed.

Sound on HP Pavilion dv7

So I have this rocking new laptop from work. It's a very nice HP Pavilion dv7. It is awesome! It can search through my entire workspace in a matter of seconds. It always runs smooth. But I had one problem. The sound was not working. It's working now.

Buy vs. Build on Techportal

Just a little notice that a blogpost was just published over at the Ibuildings Techportal. This is but the first thing you hear from me there, next week there will also be an article on refactoring published on the same site.

Open source and the times of crisis

As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?

Center of Expertise

Yesterday my employer Ibuildings made an announcement that I think will be very good news for the PHP community as a whole. A new initiative, the PHP Center of Expertise. Once again, an initiative that confirms I made the right choice last year.

Details make the difference

While playing around with the Zemanta API today, I bumped into a small problem. I first attempted to do it in symfony using the sfWebBrowserPlugin, but as I kept running into a 403 Developer Inactive error, I decided to try other tools, to see if the problem was on my side or on Zemanta's side. The problem, as it turned out, was on my side.

Steer CMS

Steer CMS is a new open source application based on symfony. It offers a CMS for websites in a way similar to other open source CMS'es, yet is based on symfony and so quite a bit more interesting to me.

Open Source, something you learn in Kindergarten

Gideon Marken is a very cool guy. He is the person behind the fabulous ArtistServer, and a very experienced web developer. It was Gideon who made a weblog post yesterday that found me intrigued. This was a way to look at Open Source that I'd never before seen.

Those little 4-6yr old minds are always hearing about 'sharing,' 'waiting in line,' 'being polite,' or being given a means to explore the world and create. If we look at those concepts - we see a foundation for Open Source. - there's the sharing - the acknowledgement of others - the consideration of many over one - the support and encouragement of creating
Doesn't he have a very valid point there? Somehow, when we turn into adults we seem to forget about these things we were taught in Kindergarten about sharing, respecting each other, working together. We become self-centered people only caring about our own carreer (well, with we I speak generally, there are also people who don't forget about that ;) ) Gideon predicts that people can fight Open Source, but they'll lose. Sooner or later, Open Source will prevail. I surely hope so, though I'm not as convinced as Gideon. We still live in a capital-centered world. Everything evolves around money, where Open Source doesn't. I surely hope Gideon is right and will do my best to support the cause.

Php5_zce_logo

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Upcoming events

I will be speaking 08-10-2010: Symfony Day Cologne 2010
I will be speaking 09-10-2010: Symfony workshop

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