FOWA London 2007 - spoilt for choice.

The workshop day.

Eight workshops running over the day, split into two sessions: 4 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon. You have to chose 2 that you'd like to attend (one from each session).

It's not fair :(.

Morning

What PHP developer wouldn't want to attend a workshop with Rasmus, the man who initiated PHP and the language's BDFL? I'd love to listen to his thoughts and pick his brains about a couple of performance issues i've seen come up on the PHP-Internals mailing list; also i'd like to probe him the future of PHP and it's place in the development scene.

I'm equally drawn to Matthew Ogle's workshop on scaleable LAMP environments: we all dream about writing code that requires a distributed approach with caching daemons and servers, right? I find this level of the LAMP architecture fascinating.

Then there's Jeremy Keith. I read his journal (and read his book): i love his approach to javascript (progressive enhancement aka Hijax) and his way of thinking generally. This would be more about the person than the content though, although the accessibility and javascript stuff would be interesting to hear.

Lastly, there's the design guy - the design director for NYTimes.com. The creative visual stuff is my weakest link: but this also means it's the area in which i have the most to gain. I'd love to improve my basic design skills, even if it was just the fundamentals that would allow me to evaluate design decisions more wisely.

Choices suck!

Afternoon

It's just more of the same: 4 sessions i'd love to attend.

Tara Hunt just totally intrigues me: I love reading her blog and her take on the web scene and i feel just being a part of the workshop would be a great experience - full of passion and user power!

The Amazon EC2 / S3 products have been on my radar for a while and learning more about them would be great - stuff like the nitty-gritty details of practically implementing them: like what scale you might start with, could a bootstrapped startup afford their service? How fast can you deploy; are there any companies providing server-admin services for EC2 rigs?

"Tips and tricks for Building Successful Web Apps" - yes please! This one looks like a lot of practical information about code environments and more "business-related" topics - something i think is important to learn about rather than being a programmer-geek with your head burried so far into code that you miss the big picture.

SEO Optimisation: one of the first things on a client's checklist and another area i'd like to brush up on. I'd like some more ammunition, rather than relying on a "make semantic and accessible markup... make a good product/service... generate content that people will link to".

Sigh. I want to go to them all.

Another funny job spec

You must have at least 54 years commercial experience in a similar role and be skills with the following: Linux Systems Administration, Mail Servers, DNS, Web Servers, RDBMS, Perl Programming, integration of PHP and Java in to Apache based applications.

http://reed.co.uk/job/details.aspx?jobid=10740748&pro=rss

Ok... so they're looking for a time-travelling, 70yr old system-admin :D.

Haha.

Job spec that caught my eye..

Most recruitment listings that i've read has the same uninspiring content, which doesn't exactly set your pulse racing and make you think: "Damn, this sounds like a great job/place to work".

I saw this on Monster.co.uk this morning:-

Due to the usual *massive expansion/increasing world domination/exciting new developments/infeasible optimism* we have a position for a programmer in our web design department. The job entails building and supporting back ends for database driven web sites and creating web interfaces to existing applications. Successful candidate will work closely with the graphics artists and web site designers. Will be expected to be able to liase directly with clients as required to develop applications and web sites.

Exposure to PHP, Perl, SQL, and Unix will get you an interview, demonstrable knowledge will get you through it in one piece, passing the test gets you the job. ASP/SQLserver would be of interest, but is not essential. Age, sex, creed, et cetera immaterial, but personal hygiene is important.

The working environment is between the epicentre of Scotland's car crime (Paisley) and Glasgow airport. Gilmour street station is 5 minutes walk and there is almost unlimited free parking. No congestion charges, no parking meters, and you don't have to share a desk. Oh and the coffee, which is free, has real milk in it.

CV with a covering note explaining why we should give you the job by email to Jobs@Colloquium.co.uk

(* select the one that you most like the sound of)

Bravo!

Subscribing to my own Del.icio.us feed

http://www.del.icio.us http://del.icio.us is a bookmarking tool which allows you to bookmark a webpage an save it on their remote server (so if you switch machine you can still access your bookmarks). You can tag each link with some keywords and with millions of other people doing the same thing you can use it to find other websites that you might like, or that share some of the same tags as those you've saved.

I never really used it until the last couple of months when i started saving the links whenever i found a site i wanted to read but just didn't have the time right then, or when the content went off on a tangent from what i was doing. My thought was that i could just view those bookmarks later when i did have time to read them.

The problem was that i never went back to them. That is, until the penny just dropped: why don't i subscribe to my own Del.icio.us account's RSS feed?! (Yea yea, i might have been a bit slow on the uptake with this one!).

So now when i find a webpage i want to read, but don't have the inclination to do it right now, i save it to my Del.icio.us account and it gets added to my RSS reader. Next time i'm reading my feeds (normally when i'm at a loose end) i find all of those interesting sites that i had saved earlier.

Further still, the RSS feed contains the notes that you write about the link which shows up "like the content of a blog post" when in a feed reader; this encourages me to annotate my bookmarks a little better, for when i come to check them out (eg, the reason that i saved the link in the first place and my thoughts at the time).