Uncreative

One week left until the PHP Unconference in Hamburg, and finally the goodies have arrived O'Reilly was kind enough to sponsor a care package with lots of cool PHP and MySQL related books, writing blocks, pens and key-holding band thingies (what are they called again?). Among the books are timeless classics like PHP in a Nutshell, PHP Design Patterns, PHP Hacks or MySQL Internals... really great stuff! Here's what I got from them: The books will be given away to the unconference attendees in a raffle on day two... now all I have to come up with is some fun way to raffle them out Thanks a lot to Darren Cooper for contacting O'Reilly and making it happen, and of course to O'Reilly for being a cool company and supporting the Open Source community so much. On a side note, I bought a book from Tim O'Reilly himself once, who was helping out at an O'Reilly booth at FOSDEM in Brussels a few years back. It was really cool to see a Multi-Gazillionaire selling books at a rather improvised table that had a bit of a flea-market vibe to it. One can only like the guy Too bad there isn't a PHP book in my current favourite series of O'Reilly books yet, the "Head First"-series. Kathy Sierra, if you ever read this: Hint, hint

Well, as you may have read in my last post, the company I'm working at is currently looking for a PHP developer. To speed up the process of finding one, I had this really bright idea - well, I thought it was bright - to not just wait until people come to us, but actively search for people on the web. So, where to look? Of course! It's so obvious - the Zend website has a job page where people can post their resumés. Great! Soo, let's search for some talent! I should have known there'd be no way it would be that easy.

Another one of the "rather different" blog entries today: My current employer, PressWatch, is searching for a full-time PHP developer. We're in the media monitoring business - which means, we're basically searching newspapers, magazines, websites and even TV and radio shows for information relevant to our customers. You may extrapolate from the previous sentence that we're dealing with quite a lot of data Thus, we're not searching for someone who can barely code a guestbook. Requirements are:

• Good understanding of OOP in PHP5 (can you say "SPL"?)
• A few years of experience in real-life projects
• Basic knowledge of the Linux/Unix shell (we're using Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris)
  • Optional: Bash-Scripting basics
• Some knowledge of regular expressions (no need to be an expert, but if your regex knowledge is very limited you should be willing to learn this)
• XML-processing with SimpleXML and PHP5-DOM
• Good knowledge in relational databases
  • you know about subqueries, views and triggers
  • you know about normalization and denormalization
  • Optional: PostgreSQL experience
  • Optional: Experience in database optimization (setting indexes, index-clustering, partitioning...)
• the ability (and willingness ) to quickly grasp complex concepts
• you have no fear of legacy code

You should also be able to read (and maybe write) English - I suppose if you can read this, this won't be a problem . Spoken English is only a requirement if you don't speak German (and if you don't, you should be willing to learn ). This is a job where you can learn a lot, have nice colleagues, an interesting environment, and lots of extremely delicious restaurants nearby (yes, this is vitally important ). Oh, and also very important: Free choice of your desktop operating system! If you're interested, please send your application directly to my employer via jobs@presswatch.de. If you're not, but know someone who is, please spread the word

Today I have a little different blog entry for you: On behalf of the PHP Usergroup Hamburg I'm announcing the first PHP Unconference in Hamburg, Germany! The event will take place on May 5th and 6th, at the facilities of the local University (which kindly acts as a co-organizer of the event). As you may know, we Germans are some strange folks who tend to over-organize everything. Thus, even though it kind of defies the spirit of a true unconference, we're going to have one slot with pre-planned sessions (topics to be announced shortly before the conference). The University sponsors three rooms though, so even when there's a session going on, there'll be plenty opportunity to spontaneously organize two more sessions for all the folks who think the other stuff is completely lame Anyway, to cover the costs there's going to be a small fee of 20€. The University will provide an optional lunch on both days for an additional 20€. Students of the University of Hamburg rejoice: You're going to get in for free (lunch excluded ). Visitors from outside Hamburg will have to find some place to spend the night, though (alternatively, Hamburg's Night-Life offers plenty opportunity to get through the night without sleeping, although I think you'd miss out on the second day of the event, then ). We've already sent out invitations to a few of the more prominent members of the PHP communities and got several yes and some definite *maybes*, so we're off to a promising start Get more information at: http://www.php-unconference.de/ Oh, yeah, sorry - the site is in German only. I don't think I'll manage to fire up a fully translated site in my limited spare time, but if there's enough interest from non-German-speakers, I'm sure I can manage to at least translate the registration form. Just drop your comments here or at the Unconference blog. Hope to see many of you guys in a few weeks!