So, I’m beginning to take a crack at my PHP New Year’s resolutions while also making progress towards my php|tek presentation, Robust Batch Processing with PHP. My first step is proposing Zend_Log_Writer_Mail. Now, to be fair, this module isn’t rocket science. Hell, maybe it won’t even get accepted! It is something I’ll need in preparing for my talk, though. See, my stance on batch processes is that they need to be proactive in notifying developers (or whomever) when problems occur. The best notification method, in my opinion, is by email (or SMS, for example). You know, something they’ll actually see and respond to.

2007 was a great year for me and PHP. After seven years of learning and mastering (?) the language, this year I began speaking with my first outing at the Zend PHP Conference in October. I was also accepted to speak at php|tek 2008 in May, 2008. First, I’d like to give a special thank you to my employer, Schematic, for supporting me in my community involvement. Without your encouragement and backing, my 2007 in this community might not have been as bright. Thanks, Schematic!

I’ve been trying to focus on PHP- and tech-related posts lately, but I wanted to take a second to post on our new dog, Abby! She’s a 7.5 week old Beagle, born on 11/7/2007. We’ve got to get adjusted to housetraining her now and all that fun stuff, along with having another living, breathing thing in the house (other than a plant!). See below for the obligatory bytes (ha!):

A while ago, I submitted two talks during php|tek 2008’s Call for Papers. Both talks have been accepted by the php|tek review team, and I’m more than happy to present them! php|tek will be taking place from May 20-23, 2008 in Chicago, IL. First up, I’ll be presenting “The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development,” which I gave back at ZendCon in October. That abstract is below: Speaking from first-hand experience, Brian will explore how to increase quality and efficiency throughout a development team. Implementation of coding standards and code reviews will be covered, along with how to adopt a framework or toolkit and contribute to your own. Brian will also cover how to help developers avoid some of the common mistakes made during development of PHP-based web applications.

I submitted a proposal for php|tek 2008 entitled “Robust Batch Processing with PHP.” Granted, the schedule has not been posted yet, so I don’t know if my talk has even been accepted, but I wanted to formulate some thoughts around the topic for a long-overdue blog post. So, first things first: what is batch processing? Let’s look at some Wikipedia definitions on the topic: “Batch processing is execution of a series of programs (“jobs”) on a computer without human interaction.”