Monday, November 19. 2007

I've seen this about a million times at various clients working in the services business, so I thought I might take a moment to mention it on my blog -- perhaps someone will find it valuable. From where I stand, there is a huge portion of the development community in general (not only PHP really either) that seem to think their job is nothing more then to write code without consideration for anything else in the organization.

Guess what? Your boss doesn't care how awesome your code is, or how slick your super-duper AJAX auto-complete wiz-bang thing is if you write something which doesn't support the business needs of the company.

Here are some of the classic blunders I've seen:

* Spending two days refactoring a piece of code which not only were they not asked to refactor, but it was working just fine before (no, the fact it was ugly is NOT always a good enough reason to refactor)

* Trying to be the developer version of Vincent Van Gogh -- code can be art, but it is always a means to solve a real business need. Over-architecture doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like an idiot when the next guy shows you how to solve the same business need in 30 lines of code instead of 400.

* Not understanding you are responsible for your own time lines. I don't care if you have a project manager or not working in the group -- ultimately at the end of the day as the guy writing the code if you say it's going to take 3 weeks to develop something and it takes you 3 months that is entirely your problem. What does that mean? It means when your boss comes over and constantly changes the scope or features of what you are trying to build if you don't push back and make him decide between getting the project done in 3 weeks or his feature that's your fault.

* Know your business - its amazing how many developers are out there writing code without having any idea what-so-ever why they heck they are getting paid to write it. If you can't speak intelligently about the business your company is in and why your application is going to benefit that business for at least 30 minutes then you aren't being a very good developer. We all sometimes like to imagine that the world revolves around us, but let's face it -- you're working in a company and that company is trying to do something which you probably should understand before you try to write the code to do it.

I'm sure there are more if I had more time, but that's good enough for now. Bottom line: Code is not the most important thing in business, even though it might be in OSS. If you want to be a successful professional OSS developer you need to understand both and react accordingly!

Friday, November 16. 2007

Hey Planet PHP! I sent an e-mail and used your form on the site but I still don't see my blog back on the blog roll... Did I do something to upset the syndication Gods?

Thursday, November 15. 2007

Alan, I think you were smoking way too much PHP when you wrote this post.. This in particular really surprised me to hear you say:

"...if there was an apache module that did mysql stored procedure calls based on the request URL, and returned JSON, I suspect PHP would be practically obsolite....."

While I do understand the concept your explaining, I simply can't see how the model is practical at all for two big reasons:

Reason 1: Businesses will never build applications designed to make money when the entire application is transmitted open-source to any client which requests it.

Reason 2: Without a server-side language such as PHP, there is not a viable security model. Javascript data validation is a half-measure at best, and do you honestly believe that it makes sense to use stored procedures written in SQL to scrub data?

While I think Alan really did go a bit off the deep end, he has touched on a pretty interesting point though. While I can't see the server-side ever going away I do think that in the near future the development model will change from what it is today to a completely event-based model based on a json-powered message bus between the client and server. IBM's QEDWiki uses Zend Framework to create such a bus and I have to say it's a very impressive architecture. The idea that PHP programming will for a lot of people resemble Visual Basic is really a lot closer then a lot of people might think.

Monday, November 12. 2007

Hey everyone, I'm back!

Wow it's been a long time...

As you can see I've updated coggeshall.org, I hope everyone enjoys the new look and feel! It's been a very long time since I've blogged (or for that matter, had a decent web site).. but its time to get back on the horse and start getting more involved again in the public eye.

There are a ton of things that have happened in the better half of the last two and a half years.. so much so that I don't think I'll even try to update everyone on what's been going on. Instead, let's just start from scratch. I have managed to import all of my old blog entries going back to 2003 when I first started blogging, and I promise that I'll make it a point to continue to blog on an ongoing basis.

Regarding the web site itself, most of what was here before is back. If something is gone I've either determined it was no longer useful and took it down (please send me an e-mail at john at coggeshall dot org if you want to see something I've taken down) or its moved to a new section. Some of the cool new things about he site are as follows:

Integrated with Web 2.0 stuff: I've decided to start getting more involved in the social aspects of Web 2.0 and have integrated this site with all of the latest and greatest social networking technologies. That means you can now follow me (I update twitter regularly from my cell), or become my friend on Facebook (just search for my e-mail address john at zend dot com). You can also Digg my posts and just about anything else Web 2.0-ish... It took a little work, although the hardest part there was just getting all of my photos uploaded to Flickr to begin with, and I'm glad I made the effort because its much easier for me to manage everything now. I may look into some integration with things like LinkedIn as well in the near future as I do use that pretty regularly. Let me know if anything is giving you any problems!

OSS Projects: OSS Projects are now located in the code section and I've created Google code repositories for them all so people can actually contribute fixes themselves.

Resources/Slides: I've gone through my collection of speaking materials I've used over the years (at least the ones in Powerpoint format) and uploaded them all to my SlideShare account. You can find them syndicated on my site in the Resources section.

I promise I'll keep blogging regularly now! Oh, and one more thing -- except the blog itself (which is based on Serendipity) the entire site is running on Zend Framework.

Stay tuned!

Tuesday, October 10. 2006

For those of you who are interested, you can download my slide from the tutorial I gave at ApacheCon this year. This is a very popular talk that I've been giving all year -- and this is by far the most extensive version of the talk yet.

Cheers!

Friday, August 11. 2006

Hey all, for those who might be interested we're looking to hire two new Technical Consultants for the Professional Services department here at Zend. It's not a job for everyone, but it's a rewarding position for those who fit the bill. Below is the job posting, please respond to me john@zend.com with your resume and requested information if you're interested!


...Continue reading "Zend Seeks Full-Time Technical Consultants"

Tuesday, August 1. 2006

Well it's been sitting on my hard drive forever so it's old hat to me, but I've put a project page up for my RewriteDB utility. This is a small C application I wrote that basically binds mod_rewrite to an sqlite database, allowing you to create URL groups for rewrite rules and dynamically re-bind rewrite rules to different real URLs in real-time using something like PHP.

Monday, July 31. 2006

Okay, it's been a long time, a really long time, since I've posted anything useful on this blog.. Sorry about that, my job at Zend has been keeping me pretty busy and I've been attending a vast number of conferences as well presenting on a whole range of PHP topics...

Although it has been a long time, I thought I would re-enter the blogsphere with a little offering for your playing pleasure. It's something I am calling "ZApp" (standing for "Zend Application", although since I wrote this outside of Zend it's really not my place to use that name). What is it? Well, basically it's an application template built on top of Zend Framework designed to give the development some organization, tools, and guidance when building an application on top of ZF. I'll admit that I got a number of useful ideas from the Ruby on Rails folks when I went to implement this but don't let that scare you away -- I think some of their architectual concepts are pretty solid myself, even if overall its too oversimplified/constrained.

For the record, I wrote this pretty much in the last 6 hrs or so for myself. I make no claims you'll like it, find it useful, etc.


...Continue reading "It's been a long time, but I've got some code for everyone"

Wednesday, April 5. 2006

Hey all,

Since Zak was apparently having problems and rattled off a whole list of things that were also broken, per his suggestion I'm now providing my RSS feeds through FeedBurner. This means that for those of you subscribed to the current base feeds should probably unsubscribe and then re-subscribe to my My new feed.

If you have problems contact me john at coggeshall dot org.

Friday, February 10. 2006

While I've been very quiet as of late, I'm happy to say I've begun writing again in my spare time! My first new article in quite some time "Improving Performance Through Persistent Connections" is now available on Oracle's Technology Network Right here. This article is one of many that I plan on writing in the coming months, including a new book on writing Enterprise PHP applications to be published through php|architect.

Enjoy!

Monday, December 26. 2005

Hey Blog Spammers...

You know who you are, the who are logging on to my site every day to post comments, manually, to help your google rank: Screw Yourselves.

I've seen it happening, I get an e-mail every time it does. You are truly the scum of the Internet. Well now you've lost your source. I've deleted every comment that provided a URL with their message (sorry to anyone who actually lost their comment on the site), and I've implemented further security measures -- you can no longer post comments on an entry more then a week old.

So spam this post all you want, you have 7 days, after which your URLs become useless.

You suck.

Posted by John Coggeshall at 21:34

Monday, September 12. 2005

For those of you who haven't heard yet, this year Zend will be hosting the first annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Francisco this year. I can say from experience that this conference promises to be significantly different then other conferences on PHP technologies. To me the biggest difference is the speaker list which reads like a who's who of not just PHP technology but the Internet as a whole:

• Rod Smith - VP of Internet Emerging Technology, IBM
  
• Marc Andreessen - Cofounder, Netscape
  
• Ken Jacobs - VP of Product Strategy, Oracle
  
• Jon Bork - Director of Open Source Program Office, Intel
  
• Adam Bosworth - VP of Development, Google
  

Of course many of the PHP favoriates in the conference ring such as myself, Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski, and more will be there as well.

If you go to one conference this year on PHP technologies, I can honestly say I think this is going to be one of the best. Short of OSCON I have not seen a conference which has so many awesome PHP-specific presentations coupled with some of the biggest names in the Internet Technology arena.

The best part is if you sign up soon you'lll save $300 dollars off the registration. Alternatively, if you've got a student ID that's valid you can save 50% off registration. So why don't you sign up today -- just fill out this form:

First Name:
Last Name:

See you in San Francisco in October!

Sunday, July 31. 2005

For those who may be interested, Zend Technologies is currently looking for top-notch PHP developers for their professional services department. Applicants must have a solid object oriented background and familiar with scalable Internet architecture design. Experience with high-performance relational databases, C development, or e-commerce a plus. The professional services department provides the opportunity
for developers to work with some of the biggest PHP users in the industry worldwide, assisting them in development of their PHP-based infastructure in a fast-paced and constantly changing environment. Qualified applicants will be hired as contract employees initially and then hired full time after proving their ability to perform. Telecommuting position, but must be willing to travel to clients as circumstances warrant.

If you are interested in working with PHP in mission-critical enterprise environments, please send your C.V./Resume and two code samples to me (john@zend.com).

Wednesday, July 27. 2005

Wow, I've been busy...

I knew when I started getting e-mails from people asking me if I was still alive, where I disappeared to, etc. that things were getting a bit excessive. I haven't blogged in a month or so, and even my friends in the internals community haven't seen me online. A lot of them did see me at ApacheCon 2005 Europe last week, which was a great conference -- one of the best I've been to in a long time. But for those who haven't heard from me lately and were wondering what was going on, Zend has been keeping me quite busy! For starters, me and Chuck (from Horde Fame wrote the PayPal SDK for their web services. It's a pretty awesome codebase I think, and I'm told by my friends at PayPal that the PHP version of the SDK is being downloaded substaintially more than the Java or .NET version which surprised them. Who would have thought right? :) So I've been busy doing that, working with other clients (sorry I'd have to kill you if I told you), etc. In fact right after I landed from Germany I had to catch a flight the next day to LA to do some emergency client work.

Anyway, while I was at ApacheCon I got to talking to some of the Apache Software Foundation members about PHP. As you know, in the past I've been a little critical of their newest web server version (Apache 2.0) and it turned into quite the thing when Slashdot picked up my comments. The big issue when it came to PHP has always been that PHP just isn't thread safe in a "practical" environment, so there wasn't a lot of motivation to move to a new untested code base. After talking to some really bright guys at ApacheCon this year over a few beers, I decided I'd take a stab at trying to solve the thread safe issues revolving around PHP (maybe I had too many beers ;)). To do this however is going to require almost every line of code being tested and I wasn't sure how much of our existing test suite was going to do the job. So I've implemented code coverage support for PHP through the libgcov library and LTP project (thanks to Theo Schlossnagle for suggesting it).

Code coverage is basically the idea that when I execute an application I want to know exactly which lines of code got executed. When you put that in the context of a test suite, it can tell you exactly how effective your test suite is at testing your code base. That's what I've come up with PHP, all I need is for PHP 5.1 to branch in CVS before I commit my patches.

For those of you who are curious, PHP's test suite covers roughly 48% of the code base -- which I'm told since we've never actually had a number to go with this before is a pretty good start. If you'd like to see a line-by-line analysis of what extensions are best tested, check out this great HTML report of a line-by-line analysis of covered code.

Feedback welcome! Maybe this will motivate those of us in the internals community to add more tests, increase the overall coverage percentage, and bring us one step closer to fixing threading issues with PHP extensions. After all, now it's a matter of pride.

Tuesday, June 7. 2005

June 8th, 2005 marks the 10th anniversary of the first release of PHP.

I'll admit, I haven' t been around since the very beginning. After all, I was only 14 when PHP/FI was first released. It didn't take me long through -- by the time I was 16 I was sitting in a University of Michigan dorm room playing with it. I was turned on to it while attending one of the best geek camps in the country by a friend of mine and he got me started writing my first PHP scripts.There have been two points in my life which have drastically affected my professional career and in turn my life -- the first was my very first "Hello World!" application written in GWBasic, and the second was my first PHP script.

Back then I didn't know who Rasmus was, I didn't think about the internals community, and I didn't even give a thought to the countless hours they had all put into the project without asking for a dime. All these years later many of those same people are still here, donating their time and talents, and I'm happy to be one of them today. I know that Rasmus et. all tend to be very humble about their accomplishment, but I want to take a moment and share with you all the way this small little project called Personal Home Page Tools that he has continued to nurture and grow has changed my life.

If it wasn't for PHP I wouldn't have ever become a writer and realized how much I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. I started writing after being approached by someone who noticed me on the PHP Generals mailing list answering questions. Even my first article is still valuable to others starting off in PHP (I was asked not days ago for reproduction permission) and from that has spawned countless more articles and books both online and in print. When people read my materials and learn something it means I've done something to make someone's life better, maybe just a little easier, and I have this project to thank for that opportunity.

If it wasn't for PHP I wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn from so many amazing people that I've learned so much from over the years. PHP has brought the education I received in college to life, given me a playground to apply it, and provided me with some of the most brilliant minds I've ever known to help me along the way. From this project I have made some great friends, had some absolutely great times, and without a doubt became more aware of the world I live in than I ever would have without it. Thanks to PHP I have gone from a small town of a thousand people on the coast of Michigan to having the opportunity to travel to one end of the globe to the other. You can't put into words the way experiences like that make you better as a person, and if it wasn't for this project I know I would have never had them.

If it wasn't for PHP I wouldn't be were I was today as a professional. This is pretty obvious with me now working for Zend, but I can't imagine that I could be doing much better for myself than I am today at the ripe old age of 24. This project has given me an opportunity to excel in ways that I could never have done in any other situation and the impact that is going to have on the rest of my life is simply unmeasurable.

Zak asked in his posting if anyone ever realized early on, or even today, the type of impact this project has had on people's lives. I doubt anyone knew what they were signing up for when this started, I sure didn't, but I think if you take a look around today the impact it's had is clear. So to Rasmus and the other PHP internals developers (their families as well who had to put up with their obsession!) please accept a humble thank you -- I am honored to be a part of this small piece of history and to call you my friends. Know that what you started has indeed changed lives for the better and a happy 10th anniversary to everyone.