Monthly presentations now at Code Greene in Salt Lake

As you’ve probably recently heard, our great and fearless leader Victor ‘mindjuju’ Villa has made some changes, and our previous venue will no longer be available, on top of which he has passed his UPHPU baton to me.

While it is definitely not a requirement that the meetings be held at the place of employment of the current president, that tradition will continue for the foreseeable future, as he new meeting location is my place of employment. We’re the one with the big green stripe on the front window and door. Note that you can get to us via southbound State Street at 350 S onto Exchange Place, or via westbound 400 South at about 30 E, onto Cactus Street. Many of you may be familiar with XMission, and we’re right across the back alley from them. Also important to note is that parking on the street at meters is free after 6pm, and parking in the garage across the street will cost $5 for the evening, and we will be unable to validate. We will continue to meet at seven o’clock on the evening of the third Thursday of each month.

There is an Applebee’s at the Gateway, a short free Trax ride away from our meeting location, so I anticipate we’ll head over there en masse after the presentation for the after-party. They also validate an hour of parking I think if anyone wanted to drive over there rather than come back to get a car.

If we find that the downtown location is for whatever reason undesirable, we can switch things up. Since I live in Draper, I would be happy to do the after party at the Draper Applebee’s if people would prefer, but I suspect our friends from the North might not like driving down there just for a different Applebee’s, but I could be wrong.

• wade
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5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP

For our March meeting, Cal Evans will present on “5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP.” It will be excellent for all audiences! We’re going to do things special for this one meeting: our presenter isn’t going to be with us live. We are still going to be meeting at Bill Good Marketing as usual (and afterhours party as usual), but will be presenting to us via GotoWebinar.

5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP is a raucous romp through PHP, covering not only mistakes that programmers make, but skills they need to make sure they master.

1. Learn a framework. I don’t care if you didn’t write it, you’re not (insert demigod programmer here) so quit thinking you’ve got it figured out. Frameworks exist for a reason and that reason it to give you the tools you need to do your job. If you are a carpenter, you don’t go out and build your own circular saw before you start a project, you use one already built. We will review the 5 most popular PHP frameworks.
2. Learn that PHP is not (insert the language you last worked in). More importantly, we don’t want it to be either. PHP is what it is, the best solution for web project. The faster you learn that, the faster you will get things done. PHP is unique and proud of it.
3. Learn where to get help. Help sites for PHP abound on the web. Anyone with a copy of WordPress can start sharing the things that they’ve learned. Unfortunately, not all sites are created equally. If you are new to PHP, look to sites like phpdeveloper.org and DevZone as pointers to other good content. If you are an old hand, here are a few sites you may not know about that will help you get going.
4. Learn your stack. LAMP, WAMP, SAMP MAMP, or WIMP know the stack you are using inside and out. We’ll cover the basics you have to know, from setting up a virtual domain, directory structure stratigies to url re-writing and logging. We will look at a few offerings including Zend Server.
5. Get Involved! Getting involved in the community is not somethng you do because you are bored on a friday night. it’s something you do because you want to know more than the guy sitting in the cube next to you. You can either spend every night reading and memorizing the PHP manual, or you can get involved in the community and start talking with the people white the language. Theya re out there, they don’t usually bite and they will help you as long as you don’t expect them to do your job for you. The next time you boss asks you about the new Date() features in PHP 5.3, you can reply “Let me ask Derick real quick.”

For the past 8 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of “management by wandering around”. These days, when not working with PHP, Cal can be found working on a variety of projects, most of which require a higher security clearance than you have so they can’t be listed here. Cal is currently based in Nashville TN where he is currently gainfully unemployed and seeking a job in IT so he doesn’t have to go out and get a real job. Cal is happily married to wife 1.25, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.

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• mindjuju
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A new year, a new start, and a new way to do things

Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are
restructuring the way our meetings will be.

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.

• mindjuju
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40% off PHP titles through Wiley Publishing

Spreading a little Christmas cheer, Wiley Publishing has offered our group 40% on the following PHP titles. Please use promo code PHPH1. Offer valid from December 15th, 2009-January 31st, 2010. read more »

• wade
• 1 response
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Methods for Mockups: A Geek’s Guide to Design

For our November meeting, Velda Harper Christensen will present on fundamental concepts that won’t replace your designer, but will help bridge the gap between logic and aesthetics. Velda is a designer, blogger, mother, geek, and full-time student. As usually, after hours party to follow!

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.

• mindjuju
• 2 responses
•  Announcements, Presentations

Post to group through Google Wave

I have created a Google Group for us so that you may “wave” to everyone in the group via Google Wave. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a pretty URL or email address because they were already used and Google has a lame rule that they can only be used once, even if the previous instance has been deleted (which was by me, which makes it even more lame).

Visit the Google Group home page for more information. Join the group and then add the address “utahphp@googlegroups.com” to your Google Contacts list. You can then add the group address to new waves and everyone will have access to it.

Note that Wave will bark that that user does not have a valid Wave account when you try to add it. Ignore that and simply strike the return key and the address will be added to your contact list.

• wade
• 0 responses
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A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security

For our July meeting, Josh Fenio will present on A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security. The presentation will track the day to day aspects of a security-minded systems administrator. Topics that will be covered include intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, and recovery, along with relevant tools to accomplish each mission.

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

• mindjuju
• 0 responses
•  Announcements, Reviews

Security + PHP

I’m pleased to announce the May Meeting for this Thursday, Security + PHP.

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).

• mindjuju
• 0 responses
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SSL + Apache

This Thursday’s meeting is going to be presented on SSL + Apache. It will cover SSL basics, how SSL works, how to get an SSL certificate, how to create your own certificates. The difference between self signed and certificate authorities. Building your own certificate authority. How to configure Apache with an SSL certificate. And other general SSL tips and tricks.

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.

• mindjuju
• 2 responses
•  Announcements, Presentations

Open Source Bridge

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies. It will take place June 17-19 in Portland, OR, with five tracks connecting people across projects, languages and experience to explore how we do our work and why we participate in open source. The conference structure is designed to provide developers with an opportunity to learn from people they might not connect with at other events.

Open Source Bridge is run entirely by volunteers who believe in the need for an open source conference that focuses on the culture of being an open source citizen, regardless of where in the stack you choose to code. All proceeds from conference registration and sponsorship go directly to the costs of the conference.

Sessions and events will share in-depth knowledge about using, creating and contributing to open source as citizens of a greater community. You’ll find relevant information whether you write web apps for the cloud, tinker with operating system internals, create hardware, run a startup, or blog about technology. They are still seeking proposals—and just extended the deadline to April 10th—so submit yours before time runs out. Some examples of our proposals so far: Brian Aker on Drizzle, a reboot of MySQL designed “for the cloud�?; Linux Kernel hacker Greg K-H about how Linux manages development; Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, about what’s next in collaboration; Amber Case, an anthropologist living in both the physical and virtual worlds, about Cyborg Citizenship.

In addition to regular conference sessions, they are holding an unconference day for free-form sessions, and host a 24-hour dedicated “hacker lounge�? at the top of the Portland Hilton. In addition to hosting the hacker lounge, the Hilton has offered Open Source Bridge attendees steeply discounted room rates, starting at $139/night.

Visit opensourcebridge.org to learn more about the conference, see our session proposals, and register to attend.

UPHPU members can get $100 off registration with a registration code obtained by contacting Victor or Wade. They have also given us one free conference pass to raffle off at our meeting on 16 April.

• wade
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