Upcoming Conferences

I’m going to be doing a fair bit of traveling in the near future, and wanted to point out a few stops along the way:

PHP|tek Conference

May 19 – 22 — Chicago
I’ll be presenting two talks:  Highly Scalable Web Applications and The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development.  I also plan on participating in the Hack-a-thon that is being held one evening, for people to sit down and together work on enhancements to various Open Source projects, such as Zend Framework or Phergie.

Dutch PHP Conference

June 11 – 13 — Amsterdam
At DPC I’ll be giving the same talk as at PHP|tek: Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications, plus a new talk: Code & Release Management.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing a few of you there!

Preparing to begin at Zend

So I sit here tonight, doing some preparations to start my job at Zend tomorrow morning.  I took my family away to a resort for the weekend primarily as a present to my wife for her birthday.  Though it also served as a celebration & transition from one job to another.  Quite enjoyable even if we both left with neck/back aches because of the hard beds, and we had our gas siphoned off overnight.

I’m looking forward to jumping into the new job tomorrow.

To have some content in this blog post, I did want to point out a few new pieces of software I recently started using, somewhat in expection of needs of the new position.  One is EventBox, which seems to be a great Mac application that pulls data from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others and organizes them together.   The second is that I wanted a more organized way for keeping notes, after a few suggestions from friends (such as evernote and VoodooPad) I opted for simply using a local installation of DokuWiki.  Primarily to stick to my PHP/Web roots, and I liked the idea that the notes were just stored as plain text files for ultimate portability.

Zend’s new Community Guy

Well, this seems to be the worst kept secret in the PHP community by the mumblings that have been going on.  So I think it’s time to confirm it.

I’ve been offered a position at Zend, and accepted it.  The official (lengthy) job title is Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief.  The short form to many people would be:  “The job formerly held by Cal Evans“

I’m extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Zend and to have the focus of my daily job to be working with the PHP community which I dearly love.  I know that any attempt to fill Cal’s shoes will be met with failure, so I hope instead to come up with my own twist on the position and to give it my best.

The job is one that wears many hats, but can be very roughly boiled down to:  40% engaging with the community, 30% writing & soliciting articles for DevZone, 10% coding, 10% podcasting, and 10% communicating information back to Zend from the community.

My first day at Zend will be January 19th.  I’m sorry to leave TravelPod behind as they are some great people; however, they understand this position is a once in a lifetime opportunity and that I don’t want miss it.