Summer Coders Social 2010

By sam keen | Published: August 5, 2010

Taking August off from code so no meeting this month. Instead everyone is encouraged to attend the 3rd annual Summer coder’s Social

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Five Tips to Make Good Object-Oriented Code Better

By sam keen | Published: June 15, 2010

July 20th, 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown (above Backspace Coffee)

Directions from Convention Center (The train will drop you directly in front of Nedspace)

As more and more PHP applications move into the object-oriented paradigm,
good design is crucial. Concepts like dependency injection, testing, use of
interfaces and abstraction are important ideas that deserve consideration in
the development of these applications. “Five Tips To Make Good
Object-Oriented Code Better” is a discussion of five concepts in the
object-oriented paradigm that help improve the stability, structure and
maintainability of object-oriented code in PHP.

The speaker, Brandon Savage, is a five-year veteran of PHP with experience working on large
object-oriented applications, and currently works for Message Systems, based
in Columbia, MD.

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June meeting

By sam keen | Published: June 6, 2010

June 15th, 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown

We will have 2 to 4 10-20 minute slots. The format is informal, It is completely acceptable to take a slot and discuss ‘this cool PHP thing you found’

Simply add comments if you would like to present at this Meeting

  • my adventures with kohana3 thus far (sam keen)
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Meeting with Haiping Zhao of Facebook

By sam keen | Published: May 18, 2010

June 3rd, 2010 – 7pm
Place: At Open Source Bridge (as an open to public birds of a feather session)

I’m Very pleased to announce that Haiping, Senior Server Engineer at facebook and main engineer behind HipHop for PHP will be meeting with the PDXPHP group on June 3rd.  HipHop is one of the major developments in the PHP-verse as of late and it’s announcement certainly generated quite a bit of hubbub.  Be sure to come down to learn all about HipHop and related work, plus what it’s like being an engineer at Facebook.

HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

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May Meeting

By sam keen | Published: May 7, 2010

May 18th, 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown

We will have 2 to 4 10-20 minute slots. The format is informal, It is completely acceptable to take a slot and discuss ‘this cool PHP thing you found’

Simply add comments if you would like to present at this Meeting

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April Meeting

By sam keen | Published: March 29, 2010

April 20, 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown

We will have 2 to 4 10-20 minute slots. The format is informal, It is completely acceptable to take a slot and discuss ‘this cool PHP thing you found’

We will also be raffling off a free pass to Open Source Bridge at this meeting.  We’ll just do a random drawing for all that attend the meeting.

  • Jordan Lev will give a presentation on creating custom admin interface elements in the Concrete5 CMS.
    I’ve found this to be a great tool when building websites for clients as it both cuts down on support costs (less wrangling with the WYSIWYG editor, photo sizing, lining up content, etc.) and makes non-technical people feel more in control of their sites (which has resulted in more repeat business for me).
    Since this feature is not very well articulated in the C5 marketing materials or in the documentation, I thought it might be helpful to explain how it works and to show examples of how I’ve used it in websites I’ve built in the past.
    (BTW, I am a freelance web developer who uses C5 for many client projects, but I am not involved with the core team).

  • Kris Wallsmith (symfony release manager): Will give a preview of Symfony 2
  • Chris Alan
    I used the PHP Twitter API client written by Arc 90:
    http://lab.arc90.com/2008/06/03/php-twitter-api-client/
    and ran continuous searches on Twitter for ’sxsw’ and found 75
    thousand users. I pulled in all twitter messages that occurred during
    SXSW for those users and ended up with 8 million messages, each one
    was analyzed for keywords that I set up, as well as hashtags, URLs and
    references to other twitter users.
    The keywords I set up include basic technology keywords, as well as
    the bands and films that were at SXSW and roughly 240 Austin bars that
    I got off Yahoo YQL.
  • Quick intro to using MongoDB with PHP. What are the advantages, disadvantages. Presenter: Sam Keen

If’ you would like to present a topic at this meeting simply reply here or in the Google Group

As topics come in I’ll add them to the Post description.

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March Meeting

By sam keen | Published: February 25, 2010

March 16 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown

  • DemocracyLab’s tech team will make a brief presentation about the development work currently underway. We’re working to improve on the policy-creation framework currently in use here:http://chalkboardproject.democracylab.org/issues. If anyone is interested in checking out the code, they can find it here:http://code.google.com/p/democracylab/
  • Brent Newton of ShopIgniter will lead a quick discussion on Reflection in PHP with some real examples of how ShopIgniter leverages it.
  • David Embree will give a 5-10 minute presentation of his latest venture: athletepath.com.  He is looking for local developer talent to bring Athlete Path to beta.

We will have 2 to 4 10-20 minute slots. The format is informal, It is completely acceptable to take a slot and discuss ‘this cool PHP thing you found’

If’ you would like to present a topic at this meeting simply reply here or in the Google Group

As topics come in I’ll add them to the Post description.

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Feb Meeting : Open Topics

By sam keen | Published: January 28, 2010

Feb 16 2010 – 6:30pm
Place: NedSpace OldTown

Time to start planning the Feb meeting.  Lets do open topic as we did in November.

We will have 2 to 4 10-20 minute slots. The format is informal, It is completely acceptable to take a slot and discuss ‘this cool PHP thing you found’

I can start it off with

Topics

  • 10 minutes to a leaner LAMP.
    Buy the “LAMP Blaster” now!  This will be a quick discussion of how in a short amount of time you can reduce the resource needs of your LAMP stack. (@samkeen)
  • Open discussion on best practices for using CodeIgniter
  • Quick demo of a NOAA weather wrapper i just completed
    (@samkeen)

If you would like to present a topic simply comment on this post and I will add you in.

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Welcome to our new home

By sam keen | Published: January 22, 2010

Well here we are,  running on Wordpress.

Excuse our ‘minimalist’ look (I actually sort of like it so there are no plans to go too crazy with the design).

I went into this WP migration with the major goal of making upgrades as easy as possible.  In that vein I am utilizing the Thematic Theme Framework so 99% of the ‘pdxphp’ theme is just a CSS stylesheet.  Also I have created a simple plugin to make changes so to not ‘hack’ any WP files.  So far so good.

Look for improvements to the Job Postings Section in the near future. If you would like to help with that effort, I’ll be posting the plugin code I created for that section soon, so you’ll be able to contribute at that point

I’ve exported the bulk of the meeting posts from the old site and imported them here.  I’m also in the process of adding 301 redirects for some of the key old URLs.

Lastly, we are running the WPTouch plugin, so definitely check out the site on a mobile device, it looks quite good on my G1.

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Symfony In The Cloud

By sam keen | Published: January 16, 2010

Meeting Start Time: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:30:00 -0800

This will be a narrative presentation of one user’s experience as Lead Developer on Nebul.us upgrading a Symfony application for deployment to Amazon’s cloud-based infrastructure.

We will discuss the obstacles met along the way, including juggling master and slave database connections, writing uploaded files to S3, and distributing static assets using the CloudFront CDN.

Additionally, integration with the Symfony configuration and environments system will be demonstrated, allowing one application to be developed locally and seamlessly deployed to the cloud.

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