It is that time of the year again where I make up stuff to ignore for the following twelve months. Last year I didn’t do it, but this year I will give it another try. I has been pointed out that these kind of resolutions doesn’t really fit into the agile way of making decisions that I do subscribe to in my professional life. I will again try to make follow up posts to check how I am doing during the year and possibly adjust the goals. So here we go. No Screen Day – don’t spend any time in front of a screen or phone for one day a week. This can’t be avoided for work, but everything else is forbidden. I am going to start with a low use day, like Tuesdays and then increase it to a day with more free time like Fridays or possibly two weekdays. Sort out Fedora – I am behind with my work on Fedora packages. This has to do with a lack of time, but also with the direction Fedora is taking, which has killed my motivation a bit. First I will catch up with all the work and then decide if I give up on maintaining the packages and switch to CentOS and let other people do the work. If I give up on Fedora there are other open source project where I could invest more time. Cook new stuff – I love cooking, but often I just rehash old recipes or do one of these “whatever is in the fridge” meals. So plan for this year: pick a new recipe every week and cook it on the weekend. Now you are probably wondering where the usual stuff is. You know, the bits about weight and sports. I see those as a given anyway. I will continue to do more mountain biking and running and eat well enough to not end on the very lardy side. I will hopefully also progress on my career without having to do major changes. As these are pretty easy goals I might add harder ones or follow Cutts example in his quest to do a new thing every month and stay with it if it turns out to be nice. btw: I shouldn’t have told you this. 

Before:

I had my test ride of a 800XC today. I took it on my usual routes through Barcelona and Collserola. I must say it is a very nice bike. Compared to my current more agricultural Yamaha XV 1600 (picture of my bike fully packed) the motor feels like an electric drive and it handles like my mountain bike. The motor is quite boring in a good way, but missing the kick of my current one. While the handling is really appreciated, the Yamaha really doesn’t like corners. Ideally you drive up to a corner and find someone to lift it and turn it around. It also loves to follow any lines on the road and kills your behind with any bump, while the XC ignores all of this very nicely. The main reason why I am looking at a new bike at all is that mine is quite old, falling apart and longer trips usually result in a lot of pain and fights about luggage with my girlfriend. So far have always looked at the usual BMW options, but I never liked the brand or their prices. I am just not quite sure if the bike is really me, my first bike was a Honda CMX 450 Rebel which lasted 10 years and the Yamaha is only my second bike. Changing to one of these fancy adventure bikes is a bit radical. I have to decide quick though, if I want to take it for my September holiday and have the first service before that. I would have to decide until Tuesday. The other thing is that they will charge me list price for bike, accessories and first service and would give me just 4000 Euro for the old one. For that amount I might just keep it. Well, just wanted to vent :-)

I planned to post this a lot earlier, but I wanted to do the presentation at Softonic first and I am also very lazy. My employer was so nice to send a colleague and me to the International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition in Berlin this year. It was a three day conference. There also was one day of workshops, which we skipped. We also skipped most of the keynotes, because most of them were in German and didn’t seem very useful. I concentrated on the topics that interest me most: agile, unit testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment and Symfony/Doctrine. So here goes a quick summary of the stuff I think was good. DevOps fuer PHP by Johann-Peter Hartmann slides A very good introduction on DevOps, mostly introducing lots of tools and how they are used at Mayflower GmbH. I found especially the bits about self service virtual machines and clouds for developers interesting. They are using a combination of puppet, vagrant, fog and eucalytus for this. He also emphasized how important the culture in a company is to make this possible. All of this enables faster development and deployment. I plan to have a separate post about this soonish. 3*PHPUnit by Sebastian Bergmann This could have easily fitted into one talk. And if you have seen any of his talks before you could have skipped most of this too. I liked the quote about removing the release cycle and making it much more fluent, reference to the etsy blog (which is brilliant) and latent code patterns. None of this is new stuff though. MySQL, PHP - The current State by Johannes Schlueter Oracle man. Improvements in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6. memcached interface, which is currently in labs. Some examples of the asynchronous mysqli interface, which sounds really interesting for some use cases. Also information about mysqlnd plugins, especially the mysqlnd_uh one which allows writing these in PHP. All of this is not so useful if you like your ORMs though. Large-Scale Data Processing with Hadoop and PHP by David Zülke slides Highly recommended if you can see this at any conference. Very good presentation, starting with the use cases of sites which are producing lots of data and need to use map reduce to mine it. It continued with a live demo on a laptop, first tuning it until the speed increased by using map reduce and later connecting two laptops to show how well it scales. Next Generation API Documentation by Arne Blankerts I didn’t expect much of this last talk, but it turned out to be pretty good. As PHPDocumentor seems to be pretty dead, there is a need for a new system. CI systems usually also generate the API documentation, so it is important that this is also fast. phpdox seems to solve this, but it is still in an alpha stage so we have to wait and see. Miscellaneous I also saw a lot of other talks, but most of them were either introductions to things like node.js, nginx, JavaScript QA, Doctrine NoSQL and Symfony CMF. None of these contained any new information for me. Sometimes I wonder I should stop reading blogs and twitter two months before a conference, just to make them morei nteresting. You can find more summaries and links to the slides if available here: http://joind.in/event/view/681

I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters. One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. The just have to start with ‘#!’ and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration. This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf : ...