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November 21st, 2009Progress on six week test – looking for authors
September 18th, 2009As a quick followup to my previous post (http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/six-week-test-followup-custom-business-cards/) I wanted to drop a quick update here. Six weeks isn’t too long if it’s your only activity. Trying to fit in a six week project in the midst of other projects and deadlines is hard, but you already knew that!. I’m 4.5 weeks in, and have a basic site template up, and am working on the info gathering portion (nearly done, but can be improved) and then paypal and google checkout integration. Given my current workload, hitting Sept 28 is still possible, but it’ll be tight!
re: timing – the designer I worked with had me on somewhat lower priority than I’d hoped, which ate up a lot of the 4.5 weeks – I was hoping to be where I’m at now about 1.5 weeks ago. However, I did not convey any sense of urgency to him, nor give him a deadline, so that rests entirely with me. I satisfied with the first round of design that we did, so I can’t complain (about anyone except me, anyway!) Lesson learned: have hard deadlines in place with people you work with 
If you’d like to be involved in testing or giving feedback, give me a shout or leave contact information. I’m specifically looking for feedback and testing from self-published authors (of any genre).
Looking for web freelancers to interview
August 25th, 2009
I’m putting out a call for fulltime web freelancers to possible be interviewed for an upcoming book project. PHP, Java, .Net, Front End Engineers, JavaScript, Graphic Designers – if you do web development or design for a living as an independent, we’d like to talk to you. Visit http://webdevpub.com/interview to fill out a quick background statement, and we’ll select a number of subjects from those who’ve filled out the form.
Magento book review found
June 8th, 2008
I found a review of my brother’s Magento book earlier today. Starting off with “However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book” I wasn’t particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.
Bearing in mind that I’m not the author, but I did see the process of writing the book, and helped put Mark and php|a together in the first place, I’ll address a few of the issues that Brandon brings up.
First to market
This became a bigger issue than I thought it would be. Varien promised last year that they’d have a 1.0 release in the first quarter of 2008. Look when Magento 1.0 was released – March 31, 2008. It doesn’t get any more ‘down to the wire’ than this. From what I see, they shipped to hit a release date, and (for what it’s worth) QA seemed to take a back seat.
What does this have to do with the book? php|a had committed to a certain ship date, which created a certain due date for Mark. About 2 weeks before the final Magento release, there was a very large codebase change, which affected large parts of what Mark had written. Having to go back and check/recheck the code, rewrite sections that were now technically ‘wrong’, and rewrite explanations about how some of the internals were working all took time which may have been better spent in other areas. This is not to throw the whole thing on php|a, or to point the finger at any one person, it’s simply what happened.
Missing info
This was sort of a design decision, compounded by the time decision. There was an effort to avoid rehashing a lot of what’s already been written in the online Magento guide. This may have been taken too far, in that Brandon felt there were things missing from explanations. There was likely an assumption that the reader would be reading the book in conjunction with having gone through online material as well.
Complexity
“However, the construction of a completely custom module seems so complex that Kismal either does not include all the finer nuances or simply cannot coherently describe its creation—a sign that does not particularly bode well.“ Doesn’t bode well for which party? The book, or Magento itself? I can tell you my own non-author impressions that Magento is likely far more complex than it needed to be for a 1.0 release. The phrase “bit off more than they could chew” springs to mind. I also understand that some of the complexity comes from rewrapping much of the ZendFramework with Magento’s code.
I fear I’m going to start to ramble, and I’m certainly not a Magento expert so I’ll leave some of the more specific issues to other people.
It may be hard to take what I say without a few grains of salt – Mark is my brother and we’ve worked together for a number of years. Those two points alone probably disqualify me from any claim of ‘objectivity’ (I’m not try to say I’m 100% objective either). There were certainly issues that, given more time, I know Mark would have wanted to delve in to. Also, given the fairly rapid changes that were happening in Magento, the curse of technical books in general – being out of date before the book is published – is something I know Mark was aware of, and I think tried to deal with as best as possible.
Having said all that, it was still good to find this first book review. I’m looking forward to reading more, and eventually reading some of my own book, the PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook.
My book is published! (and other great books from PHP Architect)
May 31st, 2008I started my “PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook” many moons ago, and had interest from PHP Architect last summer/fall about publishing it. After some false starts in finishing it, we wrapped it up several weeks ago, and happily it’s ‘out there’. Whew!
The perfectionist in me was somewhat reluctant about publishing it at first, but after several rounds o feedback from some trusted sources, I was comfortable with it, and turned it in. Then it sat. That’s the publishing world I guess – hurry up and wait some times! My brother’s book on programming Magento took some precendence (understandably so) and PHP Architect’s “php|tek” conference needed to be snuck in there too
My release is coinciding with PHP Architect’s other two books – Stefan Preibsch’s “PHP5 Migration Guide” (timely because support for PHP4 is ending in a few months!) and Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise Development“. Judging from the table of contents, each book looks to serve both timely and timeless needs in the PHP community. I’m more than honored to be sharing the bookshelf with such great material and authors (Jason Sweat, Ben Ramsey, Ilia Alshanetsky, Ron Goff and Davey Shafik!) and hope my book is helpful to those hitting the PHP job market in the next several months.
PHP certification views?
May 27th, 2008Manuel Lemos did an interview with Maurício Garcia on the topic of PHP certification. It’s good to see this sort of thing talked about more, and to get an ‘international’ point of view. My view on the topic is somewhat necessarily limited by my geography and experiences, but seem to mirror Mauricio’s fairly closely.
My PHP Job Hunter’s book is still lagging, but I heard from someone at the publisher that it may be announced in the next week or so. This topic is addressed in the book, both with my personal views and experiences with the subject as well as interviews with 3 decision makers at companies that hire PHP developers.
My one divergence with Mauricio is the topic of BrainBench. I think it might have been a good barometer 3-4 years ago, but today, at least for PHP, is, imo, essentially worthless. From what I’ve seen BrainBench was acquired a year or two ago and there hasn’t been any new development since. The PHP tests there were shockingly bad, assuming ‘register globals’ to be on in the code examples, for instance. Manuel and I had a somewhat different view on BrainBench, question quality aside. He dismissed it as not useful because it’s a web-based test. I don’t necessarily think web-based testing is completely useless. When the questions are timed (as in BrainBench) you at least have to have a basic understanding of the question, even if you’re going to try to Google for the answer.
Disclaimer: I’ve not taken the Zend certification, though I almost did last year. I may take it this year, but may also wait for PHP6 and take a cert for that if/when it comes out.
What are your views on PHP certification?
Inspired again…
May 19th, 2008As probably some of you out there can relate to, I can go through up and down cycles – periods where you’re really fired up on a project or goal, then the inevitable periods of backsliding. I’ve been going through a couple of those the past several months, but was revitalized (again) by Jared Richardson. Jared’s “Career 2.0″ presentation this evening at the local Java group was inspiring, perhaps even slightly more so becaue Jared confessed to some sickness. Even *sick* he’s a great presenter(!) There’s no real magic or groundbreaking material in Jared’s talk, it’s mostly common sense, but presented in a manner which is both motivational and inspiring at the same time. In fact, I was so inspired that I put myself forward to present my GrailsKit project at the August TriJUG meeting. Now, sanity may prevail and I may opt to present in November instead of August due to the early stages of the project, but it got me moving nonetheless. Jared also motivated me last year to keep on at my book (which is done and now sitting at the publisher supposedly out next month – we’ll see!). Thanks Jared for your presentation this evening! Anyone who has a chance to see Jared talk owes it to themselves to check him out!
New PHP book – Guide to Programming with Magento upcoming releaes
May 15th, 2008So, tomorrow (technically *today* in Australia!) is the date for PDF delivery of my brother’s new book – the PHP Architect’s Guide to Programming with Magento (I think that’s the full title). More details here. I’m really excited for him, as I know he put a lot of work over the past several months learning Magento and writing the book. The biggest challenege was dealing with the underlying architecture changes that the Magento team applied in various versions leading up to (and including after!) the 1.0 release. In some cases, there’s no actual behavioural change, but in describing the functionality, Mark would necessarily describe what was giong on under the hood. Sometimes those descriptions needed to change to reflect the new functionality, even if to the end user nothing changed. That’s life when dealing with software, especially writing about beta software – it’s quite a moving target. If you’re deailng with Magento, I’m sure the book will save you some time getting up to speed with the various aspects of Magento which might seem a bit overwhelming at first.
On a related note, php|a got back to me regarding my book. I had it turned in to them about 2 months ago now, and it’s been ‘on hold’ while some other projects (like the Magento book) took precedence. My “PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook” should be out some time in the next month, assuming no major changes. I wish I’d known about this change in schedule, as I’d probably have gone back and done some more revisions. Having said that, there always has to be *some* cut off point, and then was probably as good a time as any. I’ll post more when my book is available too.
What I’ve been up to lately
February 28th, 2008These deserves more than a twitter…
1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book – I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.
2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about tagsoup parser (seems very handy) and want to try some twitter scraping when it’s up for more than 5 minutes
3. Been doing a bit of flex/audio code for an idea I’m working on. I’m more impressed with it (flex) now than I was a year ago.
4. I have a collaborator for my book – hopefully we’ll have that wrapped up in the next few weeks and off to the publisher.
5. Doing some contract PHP dev work, adding new features to a poorly documented mish mash of PHP code. There were multiple attempts at abstracting business logic and presentation, but they’re not consistent and, imo, mostly wrong. Abstracting at a bad level is almost as bad as not abstracting at all. I’m throwing away about half the code, and have about half that thrown away functionality reimplemented in new objects with unit tests (about 50 so far). I should have another 20-30 tests written tomorrow which will round out the basic functionality, and I should be able to have most of the front-end redone to use the new classes before a Monday afternoon meeting. I couldn’t do this without getting to the point of saying ‘enough – I can not work with this code in its current state anymore’. After that it was easy. Mind you, I don’t have time to rebuild the entire thing (wish I did) but it’s coming along nicely.
