Ibuildings Portal

Life at the Support Team

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:55:00 +0100

In February 2007 I started to work at Ibuildings, at the servicedesk. At that time the servicedesk was moving from our Sittard to our Vlissingen office, and after an intro week in Sittard together with fellow newcomer Rué, we started to work for the servicedesk.

Now, about one and a half year later, there have been a lot of changes. Ibuildings is growing larger and larger, from a software development company with 30 employees to a much larger company which has over 80 employees that not only create software but also provide security audits, training and consultancy. We are not only located in the Netherlands but also in the United Kingdom.

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International PHP Conference 2008

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:07:00 +0100

Last week I attended this year's fall edition of the International PHP Conference in Mainz, Germany. Aside from speaking there, I attended quite a few sessions, and met up with a lot of people from the community. I had a great time, and definitely learned quite some interesting stuff.

I made a schedule up-front and even though usually I hardly follow such a schedule, at this conference I actually did for the most part. The reason I usually don't follow the schedule is because I want to meet people and tight conference schedule's make that impossible. The International PHP Conference luckily offers enough and long enough breaks to meet up with people and talk to them.

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PHP Showcase: Kieskeurig.nl

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:20:00 +0100

With more than 1 million visitors a week Keurigkeurig.nl is the largest dutch product comparison platform. Kieskeurig allows users to do a product and or price comparison on almost any type of product on the (Dutch) market. Users are able to review and rank both products and shops. Its main goal is to help other users to make the right purchase. Kieskeurig recently launched their renewed website.

If you're familiar with the site you'll notice the difference immediately. Not only the design has changed but also the interface got many improvements. The new interface is more consistent and well-organized.

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Review: PHP5 CMS Framework Development

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:03:00 +0100

"PHP5 CMS Framework Development", a book written by Martin Brampton, explores how to approach the typical requirements of a PHP5-based Content Management System and underlying framework.

After contributing for a while to projects like Joomla! and Mambo, Martin took on the role of a lead developer of Mambo 4.6.1. The six months spent leading the project gave him a good understanding of its functionalities and limitations. Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.

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Windows Azure and PHP

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:54:32 +0100

This week I'm at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008) in Los Angeles in sunny California (yup, being a CTO is a tough job!).

I was invited to this conference by Microsoft (thanks Bram!) because Microsoft is opening up to the PHP community, and I must say that so far they haven't disappointed me. Read what I've learned about what Microsoft is doing with PHP so far.

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Quality People

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:56:04 +0100

At Ibuildings we are constantly on the lookout for high quality people, who want to get involved in a variety of complex projects (and maybe some simpler ones). Although quality is hard to define, recently we have not just been looking for a long list of skills and experience, but also candidates who have the potential to play with the big boys, people who feel they can, one day, contribute at the highest level.

This has been an interesting exercise, although frustrating, sorting out the wheat from the (sometimes megalomaniac) chaff. The idea is that we are trying to 'spot' people early in their career, who have the right attitude and capacity for learning.

Why am I blogging this? Well, as we are currently a growing business, we need good people NOW. But also, in the longer term, we want to be aware of the good people out there in the community, and to be on mutual radars even if it doesn't look like we need people at that very minute.

It seems that on our 'PHP' projects, good Javascript skills are needed more often than not these days, and some of it is extremely complex and demanding.

Are you one of those 'people with potential' out there? Speak to us, get on our radar, and one day the timing might be right for us both.

Some thoughts on CouchDB

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:48:00 +0200

A few weeks ago Jan Lehnardt of CouchDB came by to Ibuildings UK and gave a talk about the project. CouchDB is a database that's designed to be highly scalable, in terms of, well pretty much everything really: the amount of data it can handle, and the number of CPUs the distributed server can efficiently use in parallel, the number of concurrent clients. (Note though that CouchDB sits at version 0.8.1 at the moment, and many of the scalability features either haven't been implemented, or haven't been tested.) What follows is a short description of how CouchDB works, including the unusual MapReduce-powered database query technique, as gleaned from the talk and a few days' worth of playing with it.

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Ibuildings @ the PHPNW conference

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:25:05 +0200

We're proud to announce that Ibuildings is the premier sponsor of the PHPNW conference that takes place on November 22nd in Manchester in the UK.

The conference features speakers such as Derick Rethans and Rob Allen (see the schedule for more speakers), and at 50 GBP it's very good value for money for PHP developers.

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Future of Web Apps 08

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:58:00 +0200

We just spent two fantastic days at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. There were so many PHPers around, most of whom we'd never met before, and it was so cool to hear about your current projects - there seems to be so much going on at the moment, despite the economic downturn! When we weren't playing with Microsoft Surface or riding the Sun "surfboard", we heard the founder of Digg bashing PHP - or at least announcing that they are moving some of their software into Python. The rumour says this is because of a need to use real threading and some other features that PHP cannot provide at the moment, and in that case - for those components - it's the right decision (it's as important to know when to use PHP, as it is when not to).

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Welcome Cal!

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:18:00 +0200

Yesterday was an incredible day for Ibuildings. I have never experienced anything like it before. Never expected or anticipated so much talk, chat and blogging on one person's move from one company to another. I knew that Cal Evans was popular in the community, but didn't realise fully what a celebrity he is. Wow... what an incredible addition to our team..

I saw Cal present in a London PHP seminar 2 years ago. Even though it was very techie and well above my head, I could see how everyone in the audience was captivated and mesmerised by his incredible presentation skills, confidence and lovely interaction with the audience. At that conference, I realised for the first time what an incredible following one language could have. I have been involved with many languages in my life, but never witnessed such admiration and fanatical adulation of a programming language. The more I explored, the more fanatics I found, the wider the community and the more passionate the supporters.

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