Bradley Holt » btvphpug

Boston PHP Northeast Conference

Bradley Holt — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:41:44 +0000

I’m excited to be able to announce that the first ever Boston PHP Northeast Conference will be taking place on Saturday, August 11^th and Sunday, August 12^th at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge, MA. This regional event is intended for PHP beginners, enthusiasts, and professionals alike. The current plan is to have four tracks:

Core PHP
Web Development
Training
User Experience (UX)

Boston PHP will be hosting the event in partnership with other northeast regional user groups including the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group (which I organize) and the Atlantic Canadian PHP User Group. We’re still early in the planning stages, so there will be more details to come later. If you’re interested in speaking, have ideas for the event, or are interested in sponsoring then please send a message to Boston PHP.

Intermediate PHP

Bradley Holt — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:27:06 +0000

At last night’s Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group meeting I gave an Intermediate PHP talk where I discussed working with arrays, functions, and objects. You can view the presentation on SlideShare or see the code examples on GitHub. A big thanks to Matthew Weier O’Phinney for helping to put together the presentation (unfortunately he was not able to make it to the meeting due to unforeseen circumstances) and to Office Squared for hosting the meeting. The slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Intermediate PHP

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New Features in PHP 5.3

Bradley Holt — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:32:18 +0000

At tonight’s Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group meeting I will be presenting on New Features in PHP 5.3. My talk will cover the primary new features including namespaces, late static binding, and closures. I’ll also talk about the newly bundled extensions, improvements to existing extensions, and some of the new syntax that is available.

New Features in PHP 5.3

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Update (11/19/2010): I forget to mention that the original slides and code examples are available on GitHub.

Vermont Code Camp

Bradley Holt — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:23:11 +0000

This year’s Vermont Code Camp will be on Saturday, September 11th, 2010 at Kalkin Hall on the University of Vermont campus. Last year’s event was a big success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions and this one promises to be even bigger and better! The second annual Vermont Code Camp will be a full day event bringing together technology community members, students, and professionals from around Vermont and beyond.

There will be four rooms with sessions on .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, and more. Two of the rooms will have .NET topics and another will have sessions on free/open source software. There will be a fourth room where developers will be introduced to various technologies that they may not use every day. For example, are you a .NET developer? Come and learn about PHP, Ruby, Python, or Java. A Ruby developer? Learn about .NET, PHP, Python, or Java. You get the idea.

Vermont Code Camp is a great way to bring together technology user groups from around Vermont. The Vermont.NET User Group is the primary organizer of the event but we hope to see others from the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group (which I organize), the Vermont Ruby On Rails User Group, the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE), the Green Mountain Oracle Users Group, the New England Adobe User Group, and the VT SQL Server Users Group there. Do you know of any other Vermont technology user groups? Please let me know so that we can invite them!

PHP Users Group Survey

Bradley Holt — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:22:50 +0000

I recently surveyed the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group to get an idea of what motivates people to be involved with the group. I got the idea from a blog post on the top 7 reasons why people join a user group community. This was certainly not a scientific survey and there were only 16 responses, but it still offers some insight that can be useful in planning user group activities. Here are the top reasons, in order of most important to least important:

Network and make new connections
Learn from your peers
Share your expertise and knowledge
Meet experts
Find job opportunities
Get solutions to problems

Burlington, VT PHP Picnic

Bradley Holt — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:28:06 +0000

On Sunday, August 15th the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group will be hosting a PHP Picnic. From the description:

The Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group invites you to join us for a picnic at Oakledge Park. All are welcome but we’d like to extend a special invitation to members of other local technology user groups. Please bring a dish and/or beverages (potluck-style). If you’re not sure what to bring, you can ask on the mailing list. Please note that beer or soda may only be in cans or plastic, no glass and no kegs. Parking is available for $5 per vehicle ($8 for non-residents). The park is also accessible via the Burlington Bike Path.

Registration is free. If you’re in the Burlington area and involved in a technology user group then I hope to see you there!

CouchDB 1.0 Released

Bradley Holt — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:25:59 +0000

Apache CouchDB is a free/open source RESTful JSON document (NoSQL) database with map reduce views and peer-based replication. Version 1.0 was just released today and is 300% faster than the previous version and includes Microsoft Windows support, an authentication system, and flexible replicator options. The New York Times, ReadWriteEnterprise and InfoWorld covered the release. Couchio has a clever release announcement as well. I’ve been reading up on CouchDB since Matthew Weier O’Phinney‘s presentation on Document Databases at the last Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting and I may have some projects where CouchDB will be a good fit.

Document Databases

Bradley Holt — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:09:42 +0000

At tomorrow’s Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting Matthew Weier O’Phinney will be giving a presentation on Document Databases. From the meeting description:

NoSQL has become a new buzzword in web development—but what is it, exactly? We’ll look at the big picture to identify what types of NoSQL solutions exist, what sorts of problems they solve, and go into some specifics on CouchDB and MongoDB usage so that you can see how you might use these new tools within your PHP development.

The meeting will be at Office Squared in downtown Burlington from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM tomorrow (June 24th, 2010) evening. Registration is free.

Update (6/24): The meeting has been postponed until next Tuesday, June 29th, 2010.

Magento Roundtable

Bradley Holt — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:20:27 +0000

Next week’s Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting will be a Magento Roundtable discussion. From the meeting description:

Over the last year, Magento has increased in popularity as a viable open source eCommerce platform for the mid to large scale online retailer. This rapid growth has lead to many questions on what has been fixed, what continues to be a problem, and how complex a system an eCommerce engine needs to be.

Have you used Magento? Are you considering using it for an upcoming project? Do you have a specific problem that Magento solves for you and would like to share your story? Join the roundtable and compare notes with others who have experience with Magento.

Meetings are open to the public via RSVP. You will have the chance to network and connect with fellow PHP developers.

To Participate:

Register on Eventbrite.

Sign up for the Burlington, VT PHP User Group list on Google Groups.

Forward this link to anyone else you feel would be interested in this meeting’s topics.

Zend Framework Introduction

Bradley Holt — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:44:00 +0000

Slides from last night’s Zend Framework Introduction at the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group are now available online:

Zend Framework Introduction

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The presentation is available under a Creative Commons license.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s also a demo blogging application called Postr available on GitHub. The application is available under a free/open source New BSD License so feel free to use, redistribute, and/or modify it however you’d like.