PHP UK Conference 2010

March 5, 2010 – 6:15 pm

Last Friday (26 February 2010), myself and Ed Lucas from White October took a trip down the M40 to the PHP UK Conference 2010, hosted at the Business Design Centre in London.  The purpose of the trip was three-fold – firstly to attend some great talks, secondly to socialise and meet other members of the PHP community, and thirdly to see if we could recruit any budding new junior PHP developers (we failed on the last part but get in touch if you’re interested in working for a great web agency in Oxford).

The conference kicked off with the keynote speech delivered by Josh Holmes, on “The lost art of simplicity”.  This was a great keynote – some of the feedback I’ve read since the conference describes it as “nothing new”, or “knew this already” but regardless of whether you knew it already or not, it’s all too easy to forget about making things simple.  An example that stuck in my mind from the keynote was if a client asks for a report… and they’re delivered a report system.  Error, not what the client asked – they don’t care about a system to do it, they just want to know how many pencils they have in stock etc.  This seemed to ring true with a large majority in the room! It’s something that we at White October try and build into systems/sites we produce, so that the client has as much hands-on control as they need, without fancy technology or “cool ideas” getting in the way.

After the keynote, Ed and I split off to attend talks in our areas of interest.  My first stop was Stefan Koopmanschap’s talk on documentation.  Another area which seems to get forgotten about! Stefan gave some great examples of how to get documentation done effectively, eg by getting your users to write the user manual (NOT the developers!).  In particular, he included “obvious” documentation methods which may be forgotten about, such as commit messages, DocBlock comments in code and unit/functional tests (we all do those, right?).  These all make for a much more maintainable system.  Great talk – extremely useful.

The lunchtime talk was given by Symfony legend Fabien Potencier, on new features in PHP 5.3 and how to solve real problems using new features.  The ubiquitous “lambda functions” came up, used as part of the example of the Symfony 2 Dependency Injection container.  Thoughts are divided in the WO camp on dependency injection, but I think once we shift to Symfony 2 and start using it in practice, it will make much more sense.  We also ambushed Fabien at lunch regarding the possibility of open-sourcing/releasing Sismo (the Symfony continuous integration server) but sadly it appears that’s not meant to be!

After lunch I attended the “hidden features” talk by Johannes Schluter which was interesting, if a little disjointed.  In particular, I discovered useful applications of streams eg for processing zip files, and  the PECL ‘inclued‘ package which shows you your require/include() calls. Handy stuff.  This talk was followed by “Regex-fu”, by Juliette Folmer – lots of sweet-throwing around the room for correct answers to questions; highly entertaining! I picked up a good few tips here, and enjoyed the explanations of how regular expressions work internally in terms of optimizing them etc.  I haven’t seen a talk with quite so many random characters being drawn on the presentation whiteboard before however…

The final talk we both attended was “Best practices for web service design” by Lorna Jane Mitchell.  This was an excellent talk, littered with real-world anecdotes from Lorna, and included again some “obvious” ideas/guidelines which I’d imagine we all forget to do from time to time! Things like stacking errors, presenting a consistent interface in terms of response codes etc, keeping as small an API as is needed for operation – all useful stuff, and a good way to end the talks of the day.

After the talks finished, Facebook kindly provided a large amount of free beverages, which we all were only to happy to partake in.  We met some interesting people during the next few hours, and tried our best to recruit budding junior developers… and failed.  Seems like everyone was recruiting at this year’s conference! We then headed back up to WO HQ in Oxford.

There were a reasonable number of stands, and varied ones at that, which was good.  The O’Reilly stand seemed to get a large amount of attention; probably due to the great discount available! It was also good to see the data.gov.uk stand in attendance, if a little sparse each time I glided past…

Anyway, a massive thanks to the PHP London guys, for putting on a great conference – definitely looking forward to next year’s!

By Rich | Posted in Web development, Web technologies | Comments (0)

Possible co-working space in Oxford

February 21, 2010 – 3:30 pm

We moved offices this weekend and over an awesome post-move burger in Atomic Burger on Saturday we started talking about what we were going to do with all the space we’ve now got.

One option that we’re actively looking into is renting out desk space, but a few people have suggested that we provide more flexible desk space via a co-working model where freelancers and individuals can rent desk space by the day.

We’re not sure whether we’d be able to make enough to cover our rent this way, and there are also other legal and insurance considerations we need to look at, but the idea of a creative space for designers, geeks and anyone else to drop into really appeals to us.

The plan…

We’re going to look at the technicalities of this over the next 2 weeks, but hopefully we’ll be able to run a trial during March to see if it’s going to be sustainable.  If it’s a success, then we can keep it going.

Sign-up and register your interest please!

One big question we have is how much demand there is for desks, so it would help us if you could register your interest in desk space now.   Then of course we’ll let you know how our plan progresses and when the desks become available.

By Dave | Posted in Business | Comments (0)

We’ve moved!

February 21, 2010 – 2:46 pm

The White October web design team has moved to a new and shiny Oxford office on Marston Street:


View Unit 3, The Gallery in a larger map

Our new address is:

Unit 3, The Gallery
54 Marston Street
Oxford
OX4 1LF

Our telephone numbers have stayed the same.

The new office is a much bigger space than we had before, and we’re actively looking for small companies or individuals who would like desk space – get in touch if you’re interested.

Some photos of the empty office before we moved in:

newoffice1

newoffice2

newoffice3

By Dave | Posted in Business | Comments (0)

Hudson and Symfony continuous integration

February 5, 2010 – 4:02 pm

We’ve been experimenting this week with using Hudson as our continuous integration server for our latest Symfony project.  Previous experiences with CruiseControl via phpUnderControl and the symfonyUnderControl plugin were OK-ish but we’d occasionally experience CruiseControl dying on us with no warning apart from the lack of emails after checking our code in.

So we decided it was time to perhaps investigate alternatives.  The obvious choice for Symfony would be to use Sismo, but sadly it hasn’t been released yet… Fabien, any clues as to a release date? ;-) It looks at the moment as if we’re stuck with a Java-based solution, so we decided to look at Hudson as an alternative.

Setting up Hudson was straightforward using Nicolas Perriault’s blog post on exactly what we were trying to achieve, linking in with our Subversion repository.  The configuration of the projects took a bit of faffing – for some reason, Hudson liked to check out the whole repository rather than just eg the trunk folder  as specified, so this screwed up some of the paths.  A bit of trial and error later and we were up and running with a build every 30mins if there are new commits, as this pretty graph shows… (using the jUnit XML output available in Symfony 1.4).  Total number of tests in blue, failures in red.

Hudson build trend output

One thing to bear in mind if you’re getting test failures randomly, or perhaps always after a certain developer checks in (and it’s not a result of broken code) is to ensure that the permissions are correct for Symfony, as SVN likes to store permissions where it can.  The fix for this, apart from committing new permissions, is to add a build step in Hudson that carries out ./symfony project:permissions (Symfony 1.3+) shortly before the build.  This seems to solve it nicely, and explained the small red peaks in the graph above.

By Rich | Posted in Agile, Test Driven Development, Web development | Comments (2)

24 hours in 3 minutes : our 24 hour startup

December 4, 2009 – 11:05 am

This time lapse shows the White October team along with our friends from Hutchhouse and Nonsense as we conceive, design, build and launch a new business in 24 hours. You can read all about the day here : 24hour-startup.com and you can see the results here : drhue.com which (until 12:00 on Sunday) you can buy on eBay!  (Current highest bid : $1,275)

By Dave | Posted in Uncategorised | Comments (0)

Movember day 30 – the last day

November 30, 2009 – 11:17 pm

It seems impossible to believe, but we’ve made it to the last day:

Movember day 30

The bros and their mos have been through a lot over the past month and I think it’s fair to say we’re all proud of what we’ve achieved. On the 1st of Movember, we were innocent smoothies, now we’re a seriously mean looking gang of four.

Sure, there have been funny looks from folks all over the place, but those people are fools who just don’t appreciate the sheer awesomeness of a hirsute upper lip. For true messages of appreciation, let’s turn to some ‘randomly’ selected comments from our generous donors:

  • “I have my suspicions that you’re dying your mustache but nonetheless I suppose your efforts deserve some kind of reward!”
  • “I sit next to Dave and I can vouch for the fact that this is all his own hair. All 17 strands of mo.”
  • “not too impressive on day 10 – you need to try harder! mum” [thanks Mum]
  • “Looking good! you should keep the look!”
  • “Argh! No, stop it! Here’s my money…”

And the question on everyone’s (top) lips: are we going to keep them? I suspect that the answer is a resounding no. But watch this space for the post Movember news, including the final cut of what the critics are already calling “A sizzling extravaganza of 4-way simultaneous mo-growth action” (our timelapse video).

Oh, and one last thing. A massive thanks to all who have donated so far and a huuuge thankyou to you. Yes you. You haven’t donated yet, but it’s clear to see that the e-mo-tion of this final day is too much, and you’re reaching for your wallet and pushing your mouse towards this link:

https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/team_id/13289/

By Dan | Posted in Cool stuff | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

24 hours to start a new business?

November 29, 2009 – 8:13 pm

At 12:00 on Thursday 26 November 09, an auction was posted on eBay listing a business for sale that hadn’t even been conceived yet.  At the same time, the White October team along with our friends from Nonsense and Hutchhouse sat down together in a Soho basement and were told that they had 24 hours to brainstorm, brand, build and launch this new business.

This was an experiment that we had decided to undertake after a “what if…” conversation in the pub between myself and Robbie Greatrex of Nonsense.  We had no idea what would happen, but were confident that if we put our team of high calibre people in a room together for 24 hours, something impressive would be sure to emerge on the other side.

The day was documented on www.24hour-startup.com with a live video stream playing constantly on the home page.  Visitors to the site saw us gather around, debate ideas, vote for our favourites, plan our development, create a brand, conceive a marketing strategy, eat pizza and cake, pull our hair out, high five, and in the case of Ben, Creative Director of Hutchhouse, sleep.

News spread quickly on Twitter with so many people talking about our venture, the term “24hourstartup” was one of the most popular words being tweeted about in the UK.

Team meeting

One of many technical meetings

The idea that we settled on (2 hours into the 24) was a website that allowed customers to search for products based on a colour.  The site would take product feeds from affiliate schemes and analyse the text and images to extract colour data for each project to allow them to be searched by colour.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was the image analysis to determine colours.  It was with only a few hours to go, and after about 20 hours of non-stop work by Rich, that we finally got this working and plugged into our test site.

Finally, after 24 hours of hard work and collaboration, at 11:59 on 27th of November 2009, we switched on our finished site, DrHue.com (do you see what we’ve done there?!) for the World to see, while we left to celebrate in the pub.

I’m incredibly proud of what me managed to come up with in such a short time : a fully functional and viable business, brilliant in its simplicity.  At the time of writing the business is up to $510 on eBay, which is pleasing to see.  But the result of the auction is not really what this has all been about : it was an opportunity for us to put ourselves to the test, to be ambitious and daring, and give our customers and others around the World an intimate insight into how we work as well as what we’re capable of.

Would we do it again?… we’ll get back to you on that once we’ve caught up on a bit more sleep…

By Dave | Posted in Uncategorised | Comments (0)

We’re all off on a secret adventure

November 26, 2009 – 8:49 am

The White October design and development team is converging in London for a top secret activity today.

What we know is this:

  • It starts at midday
  • It takes 24 hours
  • We’ll have food and drink, but no sleep
  • We need computers
  • The people involved are all on this twitter list

And, er, that’s it. Dave knows more but he’s keeping it under his hat. Doubtless we’ll be updating some kind of blog, whether it’s this one or elsewhere. We’ll keep you updated.

By Dan | Posted in Uncategorised | Tagged , | Comments (0)