@TheKeyboard Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

A while back I was contacted by Cal Evans over at the Zend Developer Zone to contribute to a new podcast he was starting up called PHP Abstract. Very cool idea, a small 5 to 7 minute podcast by PHP developers where they talk about a topic of interest to them (and hoepfully to you). Well, being one to never miss out on an oppurtinity to promote myself I agreed to contribute what I could. I settled on a brief talk about opinionated software. Also known as “convention over configuration” by the Ruby on Rails crowd.

Go over and have a listen and don’t be shy in sharing your feedback via the comments there or here. Opionated software / convention over configuration / tools with rules is a powerful yet misunderstood programming practice.

Back in September when I was at php|works I did an interview with Cal Evans, the editor of Zend’s Dev Zone. We chatted for about 30 minutes about various topics (we have similar introductions to the world of computers) but he had to cut it off there. We had even more interesting discussions during the course of the conference, but a lot of those will have to stay buried for the time being…

Phew! My talk is over and I think it went really well. I was *so* nervous for the first 5 minutes or so but cruised along nicely. I even finished with 5 minutes to spare. I want to thank all the people who came up to me after the talk and told me how they liked it and that I did a good job. Nothing like a little ego boost to make you come through nicely after a stressful time.

I’m currently in Chrsitan Wenz’s talk on using Flash with PHP. At work, we’re creating a flash movie for use on our web sites that interacts with a module I’ve created to parse the XML stream that Sportsticker sends out. I think I will send a link to this presentation to our flash guy (who I think could use some tips on interacting with a PHP script via Flash) so he can get a better understanding of what we need to do.

I’m sitting in the keynote on day 2 where Joe Stagner from Microsoft is talking about how to make PHP play nicely with Microsoft’s various tools, ranging from IIS to how to talk to Excell. I don’t have any sites that run on IIS but I can imagine that a lot of people are doing so.

So, while he’s talking I’m going over my slides for my presentation. I’d be lieing if I said I wasn’t nervous, but I should be okay once I get going.