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!

1. Network and make new connections
2. Learn from your peers
3. Share your expertise and knowledge
4. Meet experts
5. Find job opportunities
6. Get solutions to problems

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!

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:

1. Register on Eventbrite.
2. Sign up for the Burlington, VT PHP User Group list on Google Groups.
3. Forward this link to anyone else you feel would be interested in this meeting’s topics.

As a Functional Analyst & Quality Assurance Specialist at Found Line, you will have three primary responsibilities. First, you will communicate with outside clients and subject matter experts to develop the functional specification for each iteration of various web applications. Second, you will translate functional specifications into tickets that a software developer will complete. Third, you will perform acceptance testing on each iteration of these web applications to assure that the functional specification you originally outlined has been met. Future responsibilities may include implementing and coordinating usability testing plans. Some client support and training may be necessary as well but this will not be a primary focus of your job.

You will be participating in a process based on both agile and more traditional software development methods. While you will write and test against functional specifications, these specifications will be for narrowly defined scopes of work (i.e. iterations). This is a fast-paced environment with each iteration usually being only a few days in length. We are small but very busy, and need someone who is a self-starter, an excellent communicator, and can work independently. Experience with DocBook, XMLmind XML Editor (XXE), Subversion (SVN), and Trac a plus, but not required. This is an on-site position, full-time or part-time. No contractors or recruiters, please.

Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@foundline.com (no phone calls).

We are seeking an experienced PHP Application Developer with serious chops and mentorship/team-building skills to develop and lead a team in the creation of new, enterprise level applications for our large client base.

We are looking for a high energy, self-starter who loves to create usable applications. You must be able to participate and lead others in all areas of the software development lifecycle, including gathering requirements, writing specifications, programming, testing, documentation, etc…

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.

• Zend_Tool
• Zend_Application
• Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Zend_Layout
• Action Controllers
• View Scripts
• Zend_Test
• Modeling domain objects
• Zend_Form
• Zend_Db_Table
• Data Mapper
• Zend_Paginator
• Zend_Date
• Zend_Markup
• Zend_Navigation
• Controller Plugins

I’ve created a demo blogging application called Postr that I’ll be using as an example throughout the presentation. Thanks to Jason there is some CSS that makes the application much more usable. I will post the presentation to my SlideShare account after tonight’s meeting.

The meeting is from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM at Office Squared in Burlington, Vermont. If you’re in the area and interested in attending then you can register for free on Eventbrite.

This bill proposes to require the department of information and innovation to advise against the acquisition by a state agency of proprietary software or software that operates by means of proprietary protocols when acceptable functionality can be achieved with open source software and open standard protocols and to ensure that the expected total life-cycle costs of software are fully evaluated prior to acquisition.

Overall I see this as a positive move for the State of Vermont. It does not seem to put the requirement for open source and open standards ahead of the particular business needs at hand since it only “advise[s] against the acquisition by a state agency of proprietary software or software that operates by means of proprietary protocols when acceptable functionality can be achieved with open source software and open standard protocols.” However, Mitch Lieberman points out:

@BradleyHolt functionality does not directly = biz value IMHO, biz value needs to include ROI of functions, thus includes TCO

I agree with Mitch that the bill could do a better job of addressing not just functionality, but also return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO). These should be the primary considerations of any responsible organization in deciding what software to use. However, since it is the public’s money being used to purchase this software it is worth considering whether our resources are being used to further entrench proprietary software and standards, or whether we are instead enriching the public commons by supporting open source software and open standards.

In addition to the above, there are some details of the bill that demonstrate some possible misunderstandings of how open source software works. While it’s not anywhere in its text, the bill is described as being “An act relating to comparing the costs and benefits of downloading free open source software with purchasing proprietary computer software.” There are a couple of misconceptions in this one statement. First, cost should not always be the primary motivation behind using open source software: the freedoms it gives you are just as important. In fact, not all proprietary software costs money and not all open source software is available free of charge. Second, “downloading” is simply a means of distributing software. Proprietary software can often be downloaded. Open source software is sometimes distributed on a physical medium.

It’s not stated explicitly in the bill, but people sometimes think that if they release their own software under an open source license they are somehow giving up control of the licensed software project. While there are many benefits of giving up control (which are outside the scope of this blog post), it’s worth noting that you don’t have to. When you license your software you still own the copyright on that software. You can still do whatever you want with that software, including release it under a different license later. Once you accept outside contributions then you need to honor whatever license has been given to you be your contributors (unless they agree to transfer copyright to you, but this can be tricky). It’s your choice whether or not to accept those contributions in the first place. You are still completely in control (as long as you want to be) and have simply given others the possibility of benefiting from your work.

Burlington, VT PHP Users Group

2009 was the second full year of the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. We had some fun meetings and presentations including:

January

Jason Pelletier gave a presentation on CSS for Developers.

CSS for Developers

View more documents from jason.pelletier.

February

Aaron Carlino demonstrated SilverStripe, an open source CMS/framework built in PHP.

March

Special guest Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation called “Easy Problems are the Hard Problems” taking an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of building web applications.

April

Rob Riggen gave a talk on website performance optimization.

May

Rene Churchill gave a presentation on MySQL database optimization.

July

Matthew Weier O’Phinney gave his Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects presentation.

Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects

View more presentations from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.

August

Matthew Weier O’Phinney presented again in August, this time giving a hands-on unit testing crash course [ODP].

September

September’s meeting was a casual get-together instead of a formal meeting and presentation—a change of pace from the typical meeting format.

October

I gave a talk geared towards PHP beginners.

November

November’s meeting fell on one of Zend Framework’s Bug Hunt Days. Held monthly, Bug Hunt Days are designed to encourage the community to help triage and resolve issues in the framework. Matthew Weier O’Phinney guided us through effective bug reporting and taught us how to contribute patches. As part of Bug Hunt Days, my first Zend Framework patch was accepted, a small addition to the documentation.

December

December marked the second birthday of our local PHP Users Group and that month’s meeting turned out to be a fun social event.

Our users group also won a free pass to ZendCon ‘09, and Jase Roberts was the lucky recipient. He joined fellow Vermonters Matthew Weier O’Phinney, John Valance, and me at the annual PHP conference.

The Browser

Jonathan Butler started a program on our local community radio station called The Browser. It’s “a show about the people who bring the world wide web to [Burlington, VT].” Jason and I were on the show twice—once in February and again in August.

Town Meeting Day Vermont, ACM-NE, and Tagnabit

The first Tuesday of March was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont gathered together to elect local officers and vote on budgets. As an experiment we put together a website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites around Town Meeting Day Vermont ‘09. If you used the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog posts (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content showed up on the website. I wrote a post recapping some things we learned from the experiment.

As a result of that project, Bill Simmon and Seth Mobley from Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) approached us about doing something similar for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) conference they were organizing here in Burlington, VT. We built acmne.net/09 for the conference and it was a big hit. I spoke on a social media panel (which Liz Schlegel moderated) and helped with a social media workshop at the conference. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, posted a good summary of the conference on his blog.

We then took the idea from Town Meeting Day Vermont and ACM-NE a step further, creating Tagnabit—aggregating tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon wrote a good blog post on how Tagnabit could be used.

Jelly/Coworking

I was excited to see Jen Mincar open up a coworking space, Office Squared (o²), here in Burlington, VT in 2009. I think it will help bring more cohesiveness to the local technology community since many of her customers work in technology-related industries. As a precursor to its opening, we hosted a Jelly at Found Line in July, inviting entrepreneurs and freelancers to work in our studio for an afternoon. Here are some photos from the Jelly and another one at the Burlington Free Press.

Vermont Code Camp

September saw the first ever Vermont Code Camp, bringing together people from local technology communities around .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The event was a huge success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions. I had a small part in organizing the event but the real credit goes to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman, and everyone else who organized, volunteered, and presented. I also gave a presentation on Resource-Oriented Web Services as part of the code camp.

ZendCon

ZendCon is the biggest conference of the PHP community, and this year’s event was my second ZendCon. What can I say? The talks were excellent. The people were even better. I ended up co-presenting at the UnCon with Michelangelo van Dam and Anna Filina on the role of a PHP user group.

Moving On

2009 seemed to be the year for people in the PHP community to change jobs. Following that trend, I made the move to Found Line full time last month, leaving Vermont Oxford Network. As I said before I’m very happy to have more time to focus on our clients’ projects and to work with free/open source software and open standards full time.

Work

2009 was a busy year. Some of the work included:

• helping ThinkFlood launch their RedEye product by building their website and eCommerce application (see the Rackspace Cloud blog post on the launch);
• building a news article management tool for NEHP’s website;
• creating Vermont Public Radio’s Artist Mug Gallery, Champlain 400, School Closings, Search, and States of Marriage pages;
• launching Common Good Vermont; and
• developing and maintaining a line of business web application for the University of Vermont.

Phew—a lot to say! I hope you had a good 2009, and have an even better 2010.