Me on Rails

Hello again :)
I've started with Ruby on Rails ... And ... started to like it from the first two chapters of the book. It looks that my philosophy of developing is very similar to the one Rails uses:

1. Convention over Configuration
2. DRY (Do not repeat yourself)
3. Agile development

This are the main principles of Rails framework. This are my principles too. So ... I'm starting to like it very much.

P2P Conference

P2P conference in Veliko Turnovo - Bulgaria ... what can I say about this? I was part from this event as listener :) Actually the company I work for right now sponsored the development team to be on this conference.
First impressions. Yes there are some. Good organization, using almost in every presentation Linux (me: big fan).
I will mention here few presentations that I was able to listen an liked them very much.

Ruby on Rails
Excellent presentation! This one definitely motivated me to try Ruby on Rails. I was thinking from 2-3 years to start in this direction but there was always something more urgent in some other direction or some other language. Ok! I'm there, I've downloaded 20-30 books and I'm starting. Weee!

PHP on the D-BUS
Presentation by Derick Rethans. He is developing the D-BUS extension for PHP (currently in Pecl's CSV) this could save me a lot of work while developing the OSCTry thing. On a later stage I can try to make it work with this extension. I'll share my experience then. And one last thing for this presentation. I was able to see from a close distance a OpenMoko FreeRunner :D but more on this topic some other time. Now back to the conference.

The happy developer was also very entertaining presentation.
Since I'm a very happy developer most of the thing mentioned there I'm doing and I can say it works! The essence actually of being happy and satisfied from your work (on only for programmers) is to be able to develop your self and to keep the fire for more and more knowledge burning and growing.

Now we are coming to the this presentation:

The use of the social networks in corporations.
This was very helpful to me because a week ago I was able to convince the owner of the company to build our “internal” social network. Now I can see even more the necessity of this SN for the company internally and for our customers externally. We have more then 100 people and BTW all working under Linux ;) except 5-6 Dev PCs.

Ok ... One last thing InitLab. This is something like “club-laboratory” for developers who can develop and collaborate. I'll have to think about this. We could do something like this in Veliko Turnovo too.

My first post

I have decided some time ago to start blogging :D OK OK but when and how exactly? I have no Idea!
Any way I'll start now with a short presentation of me and my work.

I'm working with PHP for ... about 10 years. For some time I was working on web based systems. CMS, PMS and a lot of custom development. I have managed to produce one of the most flexible CMS systems on the Open Source "market" - PuzzleApps. This "thing" can be used as Web CMS and as framework for rapid developing of web based applications. I will write about this some time later ;)

I was able to participate in one other Open Source project PgAccess (Tcl/Tk) I do not think that this project is still alive but it was very nice peace of software for managing PostgreSQL databases.

What am I dong now? Well ... in the last few years I was working on a cross platform PHP-GTK2 based projects.
1. Muskogee - software that enables people to enter data and save it in database. Ok that was very stupid explanation! One example will explain it better. Imagine: a magazine is making research using mail cards. They receive this cards back, but how to get information from them? Easy - scan them and send images to people that will read them and write them in suitable format. This is what Muskogee is doing. Display image to the user and give him the possibility ti enter data much easier then using notepad ;)
2. Web based statistical reports for Muskogee.
3. OSCTray - this is software that is intended to control user access to different software under Linux based systems. We have every what programs can use on his PC. OSCSoft gets this data using web services and chmods the software to make it executable to the user or not executible. Also tracks the used programs and keeps the time this program is used, after the program is identified the admin users sees this and can decide to forbid it or ignore it. You can say this is a controlling and monitoring program.

This are the programming languages I can work with:
PHP, Java, C#, Perl, TCL/TK, Bash
And some databases:
MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird
What else ... version control? Yes: CSV and SVN

I prefer to work under Linux. I have tried many distributions in my life (RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Slackware, Mandrake). Right now I'm using (K/X)Ubuntu and I can say that I'm very happy whit it.

I hope you are not bored from my first post :)