Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.

Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.

It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.

“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”

This past weekend, I accepted the role of Chief Technology Officer for BraveNewTalent, a social recruitment startup based in London. At the David Allen Company, I have been using technology to help bring the GTD^® methodology to millions of people worldwide, freeing them up from organizing tasks in their head so that they can focus on doing their best work in any context. BraveNewTalent seeks to help the workforce of the twenty-first century find, not only ideal new workplace contexts, but the relationships and aptitudes that will unleash the best work of an entire upcoming generation.

Led by visionary young entrepreneur Lucian Tarnowski, the company has already assembled a fine team and is rapidly accumulating blue-chip clients and media attention. It is an exciting time to be bridging the gap between baby boomers in corporate leadership and an inherently digital generation, who hold the promise of a new way to work. Doubly exciting is the opportunity to join not only a well-positioned startup in a high-potential emerging marketplace, but to do so in London–which is itself emerging from the ashes of the financial meltdown as a technology innovation powerhouse.

I am looking forward to doing interesting and meaningful work, with talented people, in one of the greatest cities in the world.

I spent the day redesigning my website. What may appear to be just a simple visual touch-up was actually a major overhaul. I ported my site from Serendipity–which I began using when I first transitioned to a blog format in 2006–to the more popular WordPress platform. The template is my own custom design built on sandbox.

I have had a personal web presence for over ten years now, and interestingly enough, when I look back on previous sites, it seems I have upgraded the site look-and-feel about every two years.

For your amusement, here are some screen shots from the past (click the thumbnail or year to see a larger image):

1999

2001

2003

2005

2007

2009

Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code–as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development–will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.

Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.

That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life–is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.

Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.

Meanwhile, I set up a very quick-and-dirty command-line PHP script to check the Forest Service’s RSS feed and page me when the title of the most recent item gets updated. I didn’t have time for fancy XML parsing last night, so I just relied on regular expressions to pull out the title and stored an md5 of the title string for purposes of comparison. Works great so far, and helps me rest assured that I will get the latest updates when they happen.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

As such, it represents a culmination of many of the enterprise best practices for PHP, MySQL, and Linux that I have discussed over the years here on my blog, including: Design Patterns and object oriented code, Pear packages, a dash of Ajax, a lot of Security measures and some cryptography, lots of optimization, a powerful and scalable LAMP web server farm monitored by cacti, coding standards; all managed using a few extreme programming tactics, built around best-of-breed eCommerce packages, and with a robust mail queue mechanism delivering countless emails per day.

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory–we did it. And eager new members are already rolling in. Hats off to the team at David Allen Company. Good times ahead.

Yesterday PHP Quebec published their list of sessions, and I guess the process was in motion before I decided to pull out, because I noticed my name still there. It just doesn’t make sense for me to travel so far and stay in a hotel, apart from my wife, so soon after the passing of our son. We need to be together, and I still need time. Still, it was great to see my name on the list with Rasmus, Ilia, and others major players in the PHP community. As Chris keeps reminding me, there will be other conferences. And as my heart keeps telling me, there are other, more important things in life.

My question is: does that really matter?

By “matter” I mean, “does it affect PHP’s credibility in a positive way?”; and also: “does it prove anything?” My theory is that the vast and overwhelming majority of PHP installations are in shared hosting environments. This does not necessarily prove that PHP has gained the credibility it deserves yet. It may simply indicate that PHP has a low barrier to entry. It may simply mean that because it is easy to install and free, it is installed freely. It may be simply popular because it is popular–and not, as we hope, because it has gained the reputation it is capable of sustaining as “the gold standard for web devlopment”, or even, “an enterprise-class web development platform.” I know the latter is true, since I have been using it that way for years now–but these numbers don’t necessarily tell us PHP has arrived. So, rather than the community resting on its collective laurels for one more year of increased installations, I encourage us all to consider what can be done to promote PHP through education, standards, and best practices to its rightful place as much, much more than simply a popular web development language.

So, where is PHP going from here?
I think 2006 will involve a lot more of the same, with Zend’s new marketing director solidifying the company’s image as a no-nonsense, for-business open source company (like he helped do for RedHat)–and taking PHP along with it. The major hurdles PHP must still overcome in this journey are: the perception that it is not secure (a fire only fueled by reputable packages getting exploited this year, and the PHP’s haunting past with register_globals and other bad ideas); the perception that PHP coders are cowboys; and the lack of widespread adoption of PHP 5 due to the perception of poor backward compatability.

One of the major solutions is, of course, education. Periodicals like “International PHP Magazine” (in its new, more ubiquitous format) and “PHP | Arch”, numerous conferences, and Zend certification provide help with issues of security and maintainability. Chris Shiflett’s new book helps demystify the core issues surrounding PHP security. But we need more help if PHP is going to become not only the most popular, but most trusted web application development language in the industry. PHP doesn’t need another CMS package, another framework, another bulletin board. It needs good educational resources to help bring it to the enterprise. Hopefully, that’s what we will see emerge in 2006, making PHP not only popular but mature–because the language is about more than the syntax; it’s about the culture surrounding the people and ideas that make it great, about the customer perception and adoption.

It’s about time PHP stopped being a best kept secret and emerged as the gold standard for great development. And we don’t need a single new feature to accomplish that in 2006–we just need better education within the community and to bridge the gap with enterprise.

Here’s to a a great year in PHP–and an amazing opportunity ahead!