Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics. I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.
Last month my father Klaus Damian died much too young and rather unexpected. He was a hero to me, like every father should be. But he made it especially easy. When he retired he was the Head of the Astronauts Training Division at the EAC (European Astronaut Centre) of the ESA (European Space Agency). As far as I can remember he always worked with satellites and spacecrafts. He travelled the world to go diving with astronauts in the Caribbean, do zero gravity flights, to see rockets or spaceships take off from all continents. I always remember the map of the world he had on his wall, which had a pin for every trip and they were everywhere. ...
As hopefully most people working on software projects nowadays we are writing unit tests and do code reviews. Work-flow at Splendia As our project is a large PHP site we are using PHPUnit for unit testing and various static code checking tools (checkstyle, phpmd, pdepend, phpcpd) to verify the quality of our code. All of these are run on our integration branch, whenever a new feature is integrated. Before this can happen the code will be reviewed by other people in the team and only if there is a consensus it will be merged into the integration branch. ...
I must admit that this post comes a bit late. As I have mentioned before, I have left Softonic last year. The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know. After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect. ...
Pretty much exactly two years ago I started working for Softonic. I changed from the rather small opus5 to what has been the largest company I have worked for so far. Working in a company of about 250 people with a development team of around 80 people is certainly a different beast. I learned a lot of things especially regarding scrum management and web technologies. I also learned that it is very difficult to change things once something big like this is in motion. ...