Tag Archives: Php

This week in Nerdery

Tuesday and Thursday: Banner ad webinars. Next in our monthly series of agency primer webinars, we’ll talk about how we help partners develop banner ads designed for brand awareness, or, to provoke those inclined to click them to click them. RSVP at http://www.nerdery.com/banners.

Game dev club: Some stay after work to play with game development, Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.

Thursday: MN PHP user group meetup, 6-8 p.m., with a tech talk on HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) by Daniel J. Post. RSVP at http://www.mnphp.org/.

MnPHP user group tonight; MSP WordPress tomorrow at The Nerdery

Tonight only, the Minnesota PHP user group graciously yields it usual first-Thursday-of-the-month slot at The Nerdery to make way for tomorrow’s Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress group meeting. Please note that Minnesota PHP will return to regularly scheduled programming in March.

Minnesota PHP, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 6-9 p.m.

PHP 5.3 - Mike Willbanks will go over new features in PHP 5.3 (major and some minor you likely wouldn’t know about unless you troll the release logs) as well as anything to watch for in migrating.

Zend Framework Introduction to Zend Application - Nerdery rockstar Justin Hendrickson discusses Zend Framework and utilizing Zend Application.

Please RSVP.

Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress, Thursday, Feb. 4, 6:30-9 p.m.

Session 1:

• HTML for Beginners (Tony Thomas)
• Building WP Widgets with the “new” Widget API (Ray Champagne)
• MSP WordPress Team Meeting to prepare for Overnight Website Challenge: Part I (Tim Elliot)

Session 2:

• CSS for Beginners (Daniel J. Post)
• MSP WordPress Team Meeting to prepare for Overnight Website Challenge: Part II (Tim Elliot)

Please RSVP.

Both events are free whenever you are.

Also, if you’re looking for even more user groups and other tech community-building initiatives to get involved with, check out Central Standard Tech.

I want my PHP

Got some friends who like to nerd-out when chatting about web tools of choice? What you have there is a user group, waiting to happen. Here. What we have is a haven for that sort of thing. You are all welcome.

Next up is the newly formed Minnesota PHP group, Tuesday evening from 6:30 – 9:00 p.m., featuring PHP luminary Sebastian Bergmann.

From mnphp.org: Sebastian Bergmann holds a degree in Computer Science and is a pioneer in the field of quality assurance in PHP projects. His test framework PHPUnit is a de-facto standard. He is actively involved in the development of PHP and creator of various development tools. Sebastian Bergmann is an internationally sought-after expert. As an author he shares his long-standing experience in books and articles. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.

Please RSVP.

Remix tunes with online music mixer

In the immortal words of our own Tom O’Neill check out the latest badass ActionScript/PHP project to come out of The Nerdery:

You can get to remixing your own tunes on Remix Galaxy.

Profiles in Nerdery: Jeff Klawiter, .NET ninja

Before we get started you should know Jeff is going to be speaking on April 4, 2009 (that’s Saturday, folks) at Twin Cities Code Camp. Jeff will be talking about Increasing Your Productivity with Visual Studio. Jeff will also be speaking May 14th at the Twin Cities Languages User Group on Small Basic.

Now, on with the show.

• Astrological Sign: Virgo and for some reason I tend to date Scorpio’s which are my worst match.
• Time at the Nerdery: 4 years, 2 months, 21 days since Jan 3rd 2005 (I’m an old fart)
• Area of expertise: If you asked any new programmers at Sierra Bravo they would say .NET, which is a large area itself. I could be considered an expert in .NET Compact Framework, WinForms and ASP.NET. Before being a .NET developer I worked for 6 years as a PHP developer which is how I started my career at Sierra Bravo. I’m also well versed in Linux and Windows administration and ran my own computer repair business for a while too.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I talk too much covering all the different things I do. Then I shut up and try to elaborate upon the cool things like vending machines that order themselves full. See Mark Seeman’s response for more detail.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: It changes, these days I’m really digging working with Rich Interactive Apps in Silverlight or on Surface. Normally I enjoy working on behind the scenes projects like tweaking a custom TCP protocol client or doing fancy things mining data from various sources.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: I had some family over recently that were surprised we got any work done with all the toys laying around.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; 2. RPG Video Games; 3. Astrophysics; 4. Anime; 5. Obscure Metal Bands; 6. Maple Syrup; and 7. Polish Cuisine.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Donatello, even the smart one can kick some ass.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Yes I do; The process of separating specific items out of a common term or group (yes, that’s my totally made up, trying to sound like a dictionary response).

Profiles in Nerdery: Brian Litzinger, artist turned programmer

• Astrological Sign: I honestly don’t know. Never really looked into it.
• Time at the Nerdery: Since September 2008.
• Area of expertise: Front end development mostly (HTML, CSS, JS), but I can knock around PHP pretty well, and recently did my first Rails project. I started off as a designer . . . who knew an Art degree would lead to programming?
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I make websites. Any details further than that and people kind of nod their heads and pretend they know what I’m talking about, but the “I make websites” usually brings an “oh, cool” response.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Ones that I can focus on for an extended period of time. I can juggle multiple projects, but its much more fun to have one or two projects that I can devote time to, but if they last for more than 2-3 months I start to burn out.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That I bring my dog to work. Also when I tell people it’s doubled in size in the last year.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) The IE 6 Box Model; 2) Name that CSS bug!; 3)Definition Lists or Unordered Lists; 4) IE 6 CSS hacks; 5) Bathroom tile removal tools; 6) Ways to annoy my wife; 7) World of Warcraft (pre marital bliss).
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Hiro, from Heroes, but he lost his powers recently and kind of sucks at the moment. There was a foreshadowing scene in the first season where he was a ninja and didn’t talk like a nerd, so I’m eagerly awaiting the episode when he becomes a kick ass ninja, but I guess he wouldn’t be a nerd anymore.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That question is too long. Can I pass?

Profiles in Nerdery: Mark Seemann, he knows his Lucky Charms

• Astrological Sign: Western: Gemini. Eastern: Rabbit. … I’m a split hare.
• Time at the Nerdery:
  
  
• Area of expertise: Breaking code, chess, breaking things, modesty, PHP hackery, arbitrary lists, puns, teh internets, cube mods, pick, poke, peek, games, fencing, counting, bughouse, jQuery, finding areas under curves, sounding smart, guessing, precision, luck, commas, ellipses…
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I start to explain the development process then hesitate, bring up recent projects and awesome coding tools, realize this is going way over their heads, simplify it to short and general statements pertaining to anthropomorphized scripts and happy little servers, reconsider my audience, then sigh audibly and say, “I make websites.”
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Nothing brings more glee than finding the subtle hidden unanticipated trick to make a patch of code explode. Except maybe discovering a tight solution to a stubborn problem that’s been holding back a project. Or seeing and executing a forced checkmate in seven moves. Or a well-timed joke to make someone laugh then cry because she has a sore stomach from laughing too much already. Or maybe…
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: There are dogs here at work. True, they may not have the cleanest code, their methods are a little unorthodox, but they get results.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Jeopardy Categories 2. Etymology 3. Fencing Tricks 4. The Erdos–Faber–Lovász conjecture 5. Lucky Charms Marshmallows 6. Random & Pointless Trivia 7. Transcendental Numerology
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: I couldn’t think of one. I thought of many. In no particular order: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Angus MacG, Dr. Larry Kyle, Gyro Gearloose, Dr. Emmett Brown, Gune, Dr. Horrible, Jeff Albertson, Dr. Roy Hinkley, Richard Langley, Dr. Zefram Cochrane, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, er whup, those aren’t fictional.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: If one traces the word back to its roots, the origins of the term are derived from the Greek: “etymon” meaning true sense, and “logy” meaning logic. Transcribed from Middle English as ethimologie, the phrase entered common… oh wait, that’s the etymology of “etymology”.