DragonBe's PHP blog

Sad to see that people still use a single password for all their online accounts. Every day we read about accounts being compromised, major web sites being hacked and personal details stolen.

There's not a 100% secure way of securing web sites, there will always be flaws in the system that are beyond your control (like the latest Target credit card heist). But as a user, there are a lot of things you can do to ensure that whenever a site gets compromised, you don't have to worry your other accounts are in danger.

Single email address per account First of all, if you have a Google account there's a nice trick you can do that your have only one email address assigned with an online service. A regular Google mail account looks something like <username>@gmail.com. But when you register with an online service, you can enter <username>+<servicename>@gmail.com. So, whenever this service gets compromised, you can watch suspicious emails entering on <username&…

When going to conferences you always hear "join a local user group, and if there's none in your area you're the person who needs to start one". But then what? Where do you get started? How do you organise a PHP user group? Basically, you're left in the dark and you're missing out of all the great stuff everyone else can enjoy. So how do you get started? You've attended a conference or visited a remote user group and you're completely pumped up to start a local community in your area. But how do you organise a user group meetup? How do you let people in your area know, you've started something for developers to meet each other, learn from each other and have a good time? There's no one-size-fits-all solution to these questions though, most of it depends where you're located and what the penetration level is of PHP developers. Meetup.com The easiest way to let everyone know you're organising a PHP meetup, is using Meetup.com where you c…

Past weekend was the 5th anniversary of PHPBenelux Conference and people have known it! With close to 50 speakers, 400 attendees and a massive number of sponsors made this conference a true "epic" event. Not because of the numbers, but because of the social events after each conference day.

The theme of the conference was "Carnaval" and like you would expect from any big fair, there were arcade games, money slots and even a huge bumper car stand.
Speakers dinner Speakers were invited to arrive on Thursday before 6pm because the crew of PHPBenelux had something "special" in mind: a speakers dinner in the national symbol of Belgium: Atomium. Due to a traffic jam I wasn't able to attend the dinner, but as I needed to try the location to see if it met our standards, I already experienced the good dinner in an awesome setting.
Tutorial sessions On Friday morning we had no less than 7 tutorial tracks and it felt great to see the majority of our attendees w…