DragonBe's PHP blog

2007 was a very exciting year for me, a year where I achieved my personal goals, made new friends and took on new challenges.

April 2007: I started working as a PHP consultant for AUSY Belgium where I became part of an elite team of PHP developers. Since our customers are the top-50 enterprises in Belgium, PHP development is only a small part of the job. Writing Technical Analysis and Installation guides, taking care of time, project and release management and provide proven test cases to the customers makes up the rest of the job.
Also as a member of an internal PHP Competence Center, you need to share knowledge among your team members so that the whole team can achieve the highest level of professionalism.

June 2007: Attending the Dutch PHP Conference 2007 was my first opportunity to meet other PHP developers from all over the world. With very cool sessions given by Cal Evans, Derrick Rethans and many more top-notch speakers, I knew that I had made a wise decision changing from Perl to…

Elephpants in Belgium,
originally uploaded by DragonBe. This morning at 10am the doorbel rang. "Yes sir, we have a package for you". I was curious what it was, because I ordered x-mas gifts online, so I was actually thinking it was the stuff that I ordered.

But no, 1 big and 15 little blue elePHPants were packed inside a little box. Ofcourse I let them out immediately, resulting in a cute gathering of these fluffy creatures.

Many thanks and gratitude to Damien Seguy over at Nexen Services who made all this possible.

Time flies when you're having fun, and it was fun at the 5th annual FeWeb conference in Antwerp.

I learned that accessibility is a matter of everyone (I agree to that) and by putting a little effort in developing sites with accessibility in mind, you can increase the user experience of a whole lot of physical and/or visually impaired people. Now you can become a certified AnySurfer developer, a title to show the world you deploy accessibility as a standard.

I also learned that branding is not about repeating your name a dozen of times, but to find a balance between name, colors and consistently employing these choices on all media.

There's now also a qualification certification to become a validated reseller who respects Belgian privacy and commercial laws. A bit of information was given by Ivan Vandermeersch (Managing Director BDMA).

Lastly there was the closing keynote by William Visterin (Smart Business Strategies) about Internettrends in 2008. It started with user generated co…

Tonight it is already the 5th Conference held here in Belgium by FeWeb, a Belgian federation for webdevelopers, where people can attend workshops, interesting sessions about web development in general and a posibility to network.

Of all sessions I'm more interested in the "AnySurfer Certification for web developers" talk by Roel Van Gils, since I believe accessibility is a goal all developers should keep in mind when developing applications.

Another good session (I hope) is the talk by Stef Verbeeck (twizted) about reputation and image on the web.

For FeWeb members the entrance is free, for non-members the entrance fee is 95 EUR (please register by e-mail, info@feweb.be).

Maybe I'll see you there. If not, I will post here a follow up in the next coming days.
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