Why should I spend £38 of my student loan on this?!

There is the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. This is not strictly true, however there are definitely elements of truth in this saying. At university you learn a lot about a wide range of things around your subject. This is very important in order to gain a well-rounded education (see my Breadth vs Depth article) but if you know the area you want to go into once you graduate chances are you’ll want to gain more specific knowledge.

Professional conferences will give you insight into what people are doing in the professional world. As a student you are often isolated within a bubble. This bubble contains the information you need to gain good marks on your exams/coursework, but does not necessarily reflect what is happening in the profession. This is your chance to learn from people in that profession. Use their experience to give you guidance and an insight into what you may end up doing yourself.

Conferences are not just a load of lectures happening. A lot of what’s important (and indeed a lot of what you learn) takes place in the breaks, meals and of course – in the bar! Through having conversations with other delegates you can get even more insight into what it’s like to work in this industry and also will allow you to get to know people in the industry. This is where you can pick up contacts and even potential placements (if you’re on a sandwich course) or employment for once you’ve graduated. This may not come in terms of a job offer, but showing your face at these conferences prove that you’re keen and interested. It will also be beneficial in at least being slightly familiar if a job opportunity comes up with someone you met there.

Finally, there is the CV. You can put on your CV and application forms that you attended this conference (of your own accord with your own money) so you could learn more about the profession in your own time. This shows dedication and interest. Potential employers hold this in high regard and can set you apart from other candidates going for the same job. Particularly if you are able to talk about what you learnt.

OK, you’ve convinced me! Should I do anything to prepare?

Yes, it is highly recommended, particularly if you are not overly familiar with the subjects being talked about. There is a variety of talks; some are basic/beginner, some more advanced. All talks will assume knowledge of PHP (after all, this is why we’re here) and experience with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) server setup will be very beneficial as this is the most common platform for PHP development. You should also look at the talk schedule and read up about the areas surrounding the talks, as this will give you some context for the talk and also help you decide which talks you are most interested in.

When coming to the conference it is recommended that you bring a laptop (if you have one) with a full battery. There will be power points available, but generally not in the rooms with talks and people will be fighting over them in the breaks. A laptop will allow you to do extra research around the area as well as communicate with other people on at the conference (via IRC, Twitter etc..). Finally, come and say hello before the conference in the official PHPNW IRC channel: #phpnw on freenode, and don’t forget to book your ticket!

In order to do this, you need to create a new virtual host in your Apache config. Create a new file in the directory /etc/apache2/sites-available and open it in your favourite editor. It doesn’t matter what the file is called, but it’s best to keep it descriptive. We’ll call this project “mysite”, so the file can be called “mysite”. In the file we need to configure the Apache virtual host.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerName mysite.localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite/public/
</VirtualHost>

In the VirtualHost tag, you put the IP, seeing as I only want this for local loopback (for development) I have just put 127.0.0.1. The ServerName is the URL that you use to connect to the site and the DocumentRoot is where the public documents are stored. This is a very basic set up, so there are many more options you can add.

To make the site enabled, you create a symbolic link to the file from the sites-enabled directory.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/mysite mysite

You now need to add the subdomain (mysite.localhost) to the list of hosts, so open /etc/hosts in your favourite editor and append the line:

127.0.0.1 mysite.localhost

And then restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you should be able to visit http://mysite.localhost on the local machine (assuming the directory does actually exist).

This should also be similar on MacOS and other linux Distros, but the file locations (particularly for Apache) will vary.

In the past I have found Netbeans to be pretty good with code-completion when being used with Zend Framework, however with the release of Zend Tool (something I do really like), you’ve had to switch from Netbeans to the command line in order to create the project and then create a new Netbeans project from existing sources. This was a bit of a hassle.

Now, all you need to do is download the Framework, go into the Netbeans preferences > PHP > Zend tab, Zend script box should point to the zf script (from within the bin directory of the ZF downloading). On Mac and Linux it wants the zf.sh file (on Windows it will probably want the zf.bat file, although not tested). Once that has been set up, you can now create brand new Zend Framework projects from within Netbeans, and it preconfigures everything for you. Lovely!

Many web developers are all too aware of the pain of getting their websites working correctly in all web browsers and THEN having to make sure they work in IE6. This is not only inconvenient and irritating, but expensive. However, with Google announcing it is no longer supporting IE6 and now Amazon following their lead, it is appearing that very soon (not immediately) people will be forced to update/change their web browser to use these large and prominent websites. Many other sites have also dropped IE6 support (list at http://idroppedie6.com/).

Finally we will be able to spend our time on functionality rather than legacy support.

Here are the slides

A great way of applying this is using development concepts. Do you teach students many programming languages, giving them experience of many different syntaxes, and methodologies of programming. Or do you concentrate on fewer languages, but going into more detail about what you can do with them.

Personally, I’m inclined to go with the latter (to a point). Concentrate your efforts and get them able to apply their current knowledge to other areas, which they have not been taught. However, this has problems. Could the jeopardise the students in the future, make them feel restricted from branching into the unknown? Could it also mean that they don’t look as good to an employer?

Although I’ve used programming as an analogy (as it’s something I’m familiar with), this balance can be applied to any learning situation.

Comments please.