I am a software developer, web developer, entrepreneur, and an advocate of free/open source software, open standards, and open content. I am the technical director and co-founder of Found Line—a creative firm located in Burlington, Vermont—where I develop standards-based, accessible, and cross-browser compatible web applications.
I am surprised by how many developers think it’s OK to do work directly in a production environment or to deploy to production directly from their development environment. I found a good article today that explains the traditional Development/Integration/Staging/Production practice. The specific setup may be different depending on your environment, but the basic ideas are […]
A colleague of mine recently introduced me to the concept of social capital. Many organizations these days value human capital but I’m not sure how many value the social contacts between people involved in the organization. This raised the following question for me: I wonder how much of the success around free/open source software projects […]
Ibuildings has an article on Dependency Injection and Zend Framework Controllers. In the comments, the Zend_Di proposal is mentioned. I had posted several comments when the Zend_Di component was proposed. Most of my comments were ideas on how to make a dead-simple dependency injection container for Zend Framework. Zend Framework prides itself on simplicity and, […]
I’ve been trying out a new way to run web applications on my local machine. Since I work on many different websites I like to be able to run these sites on my local machine. This lets me try out changes locally before committing them to Subversion and rolling them out to a staging or […]
Last night’s PHP Users Group was at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET) in Burlington. Adam Bouchard gave us a demo of Springloops – a service that helps you deploy web applications (among other things). Rob Riggen and Aaron Carlino gave us a presentation on the Symfony web framework. We had a smaller turn-out […]
A big thanks to Bluehouse Group for hosting Last nights Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting! Both Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Rob Riggen provided some great presentations. Matthew’s presentation was a continuation of his best practices series. This one was on documenation. Rob presented the latest installment of his framework series, this one on Zend […]
Here is the Subversion presentation I just gave at the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group: | View | Upload your own
I’ll be doing a presentation on Subversion, an open-source revision control system, at this month’s PHP Users Group meeting. The meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, May 22nd from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters. I’ll be talking about reasons to use revision control, the benefits of using Subversion specifically, […]
Back in August of 2005 Google launched its instant messaging platform called Google Talk. One feature that Google did not provide was a way for Google Talk users to connect with other Google Talk users who they didn’t already know. Within a week of the Google Talk launch Jason and I had rolled out the […]
Recently I talked about the updated Found Line website but we’ve also been busy with a few other websites! Microcosm Aquarium Explorer was launched with thousands of pages of content for aquarium enthusiasts. It was built using MediaWiki and the content is written by Microcosm Books and various authors. Information architecture and data entry were […]
