3 years ago in Cambridge

Studio 24 logoIt has been around three years now, since I started my internship at Studio 24.

Studio 24 is a Cambrigde (UK) based web agency with over 10 years of expierence, happy to share their knowledge with students willing to learn.

In the last year of my training MCT at Howest (University College West Flanders), I decided to do my internship abroad, so I ended up in the beautiful Cambridge for over 3 months.

With the support of my house mates Leena (SE), Chris (AU), Matthew (UK) & Alex (UK) and my bosses/colleagues Simon, Jonathan, Richard, Edward, David, Dave & Gaëlle, I found my way through Cambridge and the professional web world.

A lot of what I learned in those 3 months, I still use and advocate/implement in my current company. Some examples of technologies, procedures, software, etc… I discoverd or worked with:

Using all these things and the variaty of customers Studio 24 has, resulted in an astonishing list of projects I worked on. So much, I only could use a thirth of them in my presentation for the jury back at home.

Here’s an extraction:

I had a great time, and encourage every student to have a look at the Lifelon Learning programme of the EU, which helped me pay for my accommodation.

Looking back, I’m glad everyone around me ‘pushed’ me in the Cambridge adventure and I would do it again, if I had the change!

Random PHP function explained

file1_Open_Source_PHP_logo_667A few weeks ago, Jamie Bicknell notified me he read my article about the Random PHP function. Because I didn’t publish any code, he wrote a 3 line implementation of how he would fetch the functions for the randomness.

I promised him I would publish the code that weekend, and here we are, a few weeks later…

The script actually parses the http://php.net/quickref.php page, saves the result, and redirects the user.

$cacheFile './functions.tmp';
if (!
is_file($cacheFile)) {
    
$quickref 'http://php.net/quickref.php';
    
$xml DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile($quickref);
    
$links $xml->getElementsByTagName('a');
    
$functions = array();
    foreach (
$links as $link) {
        if (
substr($link->getAttribute('href'), 08) == '/manual/') {
            
$functions[$link->nodeValue] = $link->getAttribute('href');
        }
    }
    
file_put_contents($cacheFileserialize($functions));
} else {
    
$functions unserialize(file_get_contents($cacheFile));
}
$function $functions[array_rand($functions)];
$function 'http://php.net' $function;
header('Location: ' $functiontrue303);
die();

Some improvements:

  • Invalidate the cache file when a new PHP version is announced.
  • Read random lines from the file (instead of loading the complete array in the memory).

Update: Forgot the mention the actual blogpost of Jamie Bicknell…

phpBenelux

phpbenelux_logoAs you can see in my Blogroll panel, on my homepage, profile and LinkedIn, I’m a proud member of phpBenelux.

Tuesday there was another meeting, this time in the offices of Netlog, with talks from Ivo Jansch about “PHP and the Cloud” and Felix De Vliegher about “High gear PHP with Gearman”.

Because it took me quite a while to figure out what user group was/is the real one and what’s the plan for the future, I wanted to share my “knownledge” with you:

  • phpBenelux is the new name after phpBelgium and phpgg merged.
    I’m still waiting for Luxembourg, but they’ll come along :).
  • Meetings are held monthly, one month in the Netherlands, the other month in Belgium.
  • A new website (phpBenelux.eu) is on the way, and I’m offering my help, together with my colleague Jochen.

I will post updates on the list above, because there are still some questions that I haven’t figured out yet:

  • How the website is working.
  • What should have happened, after I payed € 15.
  • Why the “statutes” are still those of phpgg.

That being said: phpBenelux is a great user group, where I’ll offer my help to expand the knowledge of PHP into the benelux.

See you on the next meeting!

Random PHP function

To explore new things, I sometimes use the ‘Random article‘ link on Wikipedia. It is a simple and basic principle, but it gets you to articles you would never get by just browsing the site.

I was looking for something that did the same job for the php.net site, but could not find anything. As a programmer, you’re most likely to end up in the same chapters of the manual over and over again, and a ‘Random function’ link would be nice to find out new stuff.

So I wrote on myself…

The script parses the http://php.net/quickref.php page, and picks a random link to redirect you to. Anyone heard of HaruDoc? 🙂

Try it yourself: Random PHP Function. Good luck!