Just a little note that I’m officially changing my duties around a bit at work. During my three years at Schematic, year one was spent as a Senior Software Developer, the second was spent as a Manager for our Open Source Platforms Group (the PHP team), and for the third, I went back to the hands-on technology side as a Senior Software Architect in OSPG. Now, I’ve decided to make a move back over to the management side as “Senior Manager, Technology” in our Atlanta office.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects. I’ve got some decent experience writing unit tests with PHPUnit, using a smoke testing script, and even writing use cases (it’s been a while, though). Generally speaking, my perception is that software development shops that really care about and emphasize quality have processes that consist of things such as: Writing use cases Performing code reviews Unit testing Continuous integration Writing test cases and test plans (ala a Quality Assurance department) …and so on.

Just a note that I’ll be speaking at this year’s Zend PHP Conference in Santa Clara, CA from September 15-18. This time around, I’ll be giving a new talk: Rickroll To Go With PHP, WURFL, and Other Open Source Tools Want to get that wallpaper on your iPhone or that Rick Astley video on your Nokia N95? In a world where mobile content is becoming more prevalent by the day, how can we enhance the experience of gathering images, audio and video for consumption on mobile devices?

Someday I’ll look back on this post and think it’s super lame, but my recent submission of two tests for PHP’s putenv() function made it into PHP_5_3! I’ve officially made a contribution…it’s a red letter day, folks. Without Atlanta PHP and PHP’s Testfest, none of this would have been possible. :) See the CVS commit message here Specifically, these two tests test the use of putenv() with INI settings safe_mode_allowed_env_vars and safe_mode_protected_env_vars set. I just wanted to do my part to increase the code coverage a little bit, that’s all. Too bad safe mode is being dropped in PHP 6, but ssssshhhh!

For those of you interested, I’ve made the PDFs of my slides from php|tek 2008 available below: The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development Robust Batch Processing with PHP If you have any questions or comments on the materials, feel free to email me (brian at deshong dot net).