mainPresentation – Sales 101: The Basics – Daniel Crookston
An overview of a handful of simple sales techniques you can use to schedule more sales calls, win more contracts, and ultimately earn more money. The skills we’ll be focusing on include turning a cold call (whether incoming or outgoing) into an appointment, helping the people you meet with to feel comfortable giving you their business, and negotiating for a better price once they have agreed to purchase your services.

phpFundamentals presentation – Cookies & Sessions in PHP.
For this month’s beginners PHP presentation, the topic will be Cookies & Sessions in PHP. The purpose of Cookies and Sessions and where to implement them into your website. We’ll cover how to use them, as well as some common mistakes that new developers can make.
Presented by Justin Carmony

specialPresentation – Stackable.com
Xmission will be coming out to present to us on what stackable.com is and how it works for you. They will be answering your questions.

Dan Crookston – About the Main Presenter
Dan has been programming since he was very young, and programmed professionally for 7 years in PHP. He realized pretty quickly that sales was going to be a big part of being successful, so he took some sales classes and did a lot of studying.
Recently he took a full time sales position to get more experience in a sales-only environment and to have an opportunity to learn from people who sell full time. They should feel free to contact me. My email address is dcrookston@gmail.com.

Utah PHP Users Group
Meeting Thursday, Feb 18 at 7pm
12393 Gateway Park Place Suite 600
uphpu.org

After hours party at Applebees 8:45pm at Applebees in Draper

New Meeting Structure

We will be splitting our PHP meetings into 2 parts. First part is basic skills / best practices training. This is for you new guys who want to learn, but don’t know where to start. This section is called PHP fundamentals and will be hosted by Justin Carmony. He and I are working on some printed materials and are ramping this up as we speak. We also have several very senior and tenured members who are VERY friendly to questions. The second portion of our meeting will be a more advanced topic that will be of benefit to intermediate / advanced members, but will still be of great benefit to those who are new.

Still Social!

For those interested in the social aspect of our meeting, we still have the famous UPHPU Afterhours party.

Resources

As far as learning resources, Ray Hunter and I are working on having books available at our meetings. While we will have some fun / zany way of handing out the books, there is an understood condition of receiving the book. You MUST write a review of the book and post it online. If you don’t want to write a review, don’t take the book. I will be breaking arms on this!

Online Resources

I know that our recordings have been sporadic. i’m working on allocating more time to this.

We are also running a tech book drive to assist those who are just starting to learn web programming! You and I both know you’re not using those HTML books anymore! bring them in and let somebody else benefit from something collecting dust on your shelf! Bring in what you can, HTML, JavaScript, etc, I promise it’ll go to good use.

Wade Shearer is a professional graphic artist, interaction designer, and software engineer. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s Visual Arts College and an active member of local communities advocating and supporting the arts, computing, and internet technologies. He is the founder and administrator of the Utah PHP Users Group, the Utah Apple Users Group, and the Utah Graphic Artists Forum. You can also find him publishing in the online journals North Temple and Utah Preppers.

Wade is an avid outdoorsman, gardner, and cyclist. He is currently employed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints where he works as a senior interaction designer and user advocate for custom web application development. Previous employment includes Senior Manager of Interactive Marketing and Operations at Omniture, Creative Director at Doba, and Interaction Designer at 3Form. He also consults for clients, offering services such as identity development, brand management, art direction, campaign and collateral design, environmental graphics, and interior design.

Josh Fenio is a software engineer in Northern Nevada, known as “stderr” or “dataw0lf” on the IRCs.

It’ll cover some of the basics of web application security, such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF), SQL injection and some tips for their prevention and becoming more security conscious. There will be some demonstrations of all the topics with some suggested solutions. We’ll also see a demonstration of the simplistic Browser exploitation Framework (BeEF) project from bindshell.net , which presents an interesting take on potentials of XSS and XSRF within the browser.

A little about Eric:

I’ve been a programmer since I was age 12, back in the days of TI-83 graphing calculators and the lot. From there, I learned to develop through a combination of languages including Visual Basic, Delphi, and C/C++ with mostly security and personal firewall penetration testing applications that performed on the Windows platform. I learned substantially about the Windows API framework and developed most of my system level programming skillsets from this focus. I’m coming up on my senior year of my Bachelor’s degree program at Weber State University and work almost exclusively with web development technologies, such as PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, etc.

For the past year, I’ve worked at Code Greene, a web development company based in downtown Salt Lake City; I’ve worked on backend medium to large scale integration projects as well as custom PHP and CakePHP web frontends and sites, though my preferences are towards integration and API projects. While I know CakePHP best, I have looked at other PHP frameworks, such as Code Igniter and Zend Framework. In terms of my computer preferences, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming so a Linux distro, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu, with some quality hardware usually suits me well. I don’t like Windows much anymore, as in the past year I have migrated all but one of my home systems to Ubuntu and only have to use Windows minimally at the university. Honestly, either way works if I can get the job done without too many runarounds, and you know…button clicks.

Eric can be followed on twitter at xtrementl (Extreme-NTL).

Lonnie Olson aka. fungus is a long time Linux/BSD administrator with a love of programming, networking, and security. Infrequent postings can be found at http://lonnieolson.com/ or on twitter @fungus.

eggyknap, known in meatspace as Josh Tolley, is a database administrator by day and, time permitting, a PostgreSQL hacker by night, who infrequently publishes items of occasional value at http://eggyknap.blogspot.com.

Joseph will be presenting on WordPress APIs, XML-RPC & AtomPub. WordPress has two sets of APIs available for third party clients, XML-RPC and AtomPub. We’ll cover the background and details about both, how OAuth may fit in the future and then dive into PHP examples of how to use XML-RPC to manage your WordPress blog.

Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife and two daughters. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything.

It’s that time again to start up Geek Lunches for this year, and we’ve decided to kick them off by having one in Utah County! (I have been sorely chastised for not having more events in Utah County – and look to amend that this year!)

This month’s Geek Lunch is going to be at The Smokehouse Pizza and BBQ in Orem.

The event will be Feb 20 at 12:30p.

Address below:

The Smokehouse Pizza and BBQ
214 East University Parkway
Orem, Utah 84058 United States

PLEASE PLEASE RSVP @ http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1819312/