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. ...
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 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. They 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: ...
Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk . Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn’t really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked. ...
This week I started my new job at Softonic. After three years at opus5 I decided that it was time to move on. I learned a lot in this time and as I like to say, a lot of things I really never wanted to learn. I worked in a great team and wish them all the luck for the future (And in case you are looking for a PHP job, I am sure they are looking for more people). ...