Monthly Archives: January 2011

Organizing the Dutch PHP Conference

Posted by harrie on January 21, 2011 None comments

Dutch PHP Conference 2011
Some of you might already have noticed, others might not, but this year I am part of the team at Ibuildings that is responsible for organizing the DPC: the Dutch PHP Conference. As you can imagine I am thrilled about this! It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago I was just a visitor at the DPC, visiting one of my first conferences, and this year I am actually helping to put it all together!

Of course, I could not possibly do this just by myself. Just imagine what needs to be done: the website needs to be built, the talks need to be selected, the speakers need to be informed, the tickets sales have to be taken care of, the venue needs to be booked, the flights and hotel rooms for the speakers have to be arranged, the social event needs to be organized. Etc. Etc. The list just keeps going. Organizing the conference is a huge task and a lot of people at Ibuildings are helping to organize it. Luckily most members of the team are pretty experienced by now, as they have been involved with organizing the DPC from the very first edition. It is comforting to have such a solid base to rely upon.

I myself will be mainly working together with my colleague Felix de Vliegher. Together we are responsible for what I think is the most fun part of the entire operation: creating the conference schedule, communicating with the community and communicating with the speakers. We will also host the conference, which I think is pretty exciting. Yes I have spoken to groups before. Quite large groups actually. But this time I will be speaking to a fully packed room on the main stage. Cool! I suppose it is much like doing a talk – only this time I will not be talking about database version control, but about what kind of sunglasses we found on the floor of room B and when you will get your food.

At the moment we are very busy selecting the talks and creating the conference schedule. Together with a couple of colleagues we are trying to figure out which talks are the best ones. Not an easy task when you can only pick about 30 talks from 240 great proposals! I really enjoyed reading them all and it is interesting to see all the different subjects and ideas people come up with. It is sad that we will have to disappoint most of the submitters – but having them all would result in a 16 day conference or something, which would not be very realistic either now would it? :-)

TechPortal article on database version control

Posted by harrie on January 11, 2011 2 comments

techPortalLast year I spoke at different conferences throughout Europe about database version control. However, a while ago I decided that I did the talk often enough and that it’s time to move on. Therefor I wrote a big wrap-up article that summarizes everything I told (and learned) during these events. I’m proud to announce that this article was published on ibuildings’ techPortal site today!

You can find the article here:
http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2011/01/11/database-version-control/

Why my analogue year calendar rocks

Posted by harrie on January 8, 2011 4 comments

I think most of us don’t have analogue calenders these days. Neither did I: for both my personal and my work calendar I use Google Calendar. My phone shows appointments in these calendars (Anroid built-in functionality) and I can set reminders on my phone for appointments I don’t want to miss. Useful, because I have my phone always with me, so I never miss anything. The same goes for my laptop. On both devices I can toggle personal and business appointments on or off based on what I want to see, and most importantly: everything is in one place. An absolute must from a time-management perspective.

The 2011 year calendar hanging next to my desk

Therefor I was a bit skeptical when Jeroen van Sluijs, one of my colleagues, told me about his analogue calendar. He showed me, and it was a simple piece of paper with the entire year calendar printed out on it. How on earth can this be useful when I have all this fancy technology to do the job? Nevertheless, I decided to give his calendar a try. I printed the calendar on a piece of paper and put it next to my desk. I used a text marker to mark all official holidays, as well as “days off”. The basic rule here is: pink means day off – you get to sleep out. During the year I started adding other stuff. Conferences, due-dates for call for papers. Important dates I definitely didn’t want to miss or was looking forward to. I decided to mark those my drawing a circle around that date and writing a 1-word description next to it.

And imagine what? It works great!

The reason that this is useful to have in addition to your existing calendar is that whenever the scale of your calendar-view changes, the significance of appointments changes as well. It’s quite easy: when I’m looking at a day-view I want to know exactly at what time what’s going on. I need to go to get a haircut at 3pm. Great, I’ll be there. On month-view however the time isn’t important – just the fact that I’m getting a haircut on that date will suffice. On a year view, seeing all year’s appointments simply would result in one big unusable and unreadable list. It’s far too detailed!

That’s exactly what this calendar next to my desk does: it gives me a filtered view of the year, only showing the appointments that are important on a year’s-view. I don’t mark my tennis lessons there every Friday. Neither do I put down when I’m getting a haircut – I’ve got Google Calendar to do that. The year calendar is for stuff like days off, conferences, deadlines of projects etc. It’s hanging next to my desk, so whenever I want to know something like that, I simply have to turn my head and I see directly what’s going on.

Everybody is different, and especially for these kind of things it’s important to not just do as you’re told, but choose the solution that works best for you. However, the calendar has worked great for me so far – so maybe it will work for you as well. Also, figure out your own standard – use different colors with different meanings. Write stuff next to it. Draw arrows. Maybe use certain shapes for lining-in certain dates. Get creative! It’s analogue, the sky is the limit!

The calendar I use was generated by this pre-historic but still working CGI script: http://cgi.dit.nl/kalender.cgi (dutch). Be sure to mark “Enkel de kalender (printen)” at the bottom, and off course any other options you prefer. English versions available as well and easy to find. You can find an example here: http://www.freeprintablecalendar.net/2011/printcalendar.aspx.