Some believe programming is a science, with well-defined rules that if properly followed always give you the same outcome.  Some believe programming is engineering, practical application of some kind of pure science such as math.  I personally feel programming is a craft.  That word often makes people blink a few times, especially those steeped in logic.  Craftsmanship means applying specialized knowledge with skill in a practical manner.

Usually when I start mentioning programming as a craft, people are up in arms shouting “crafts should have intrinsic value.”  No, you’re thinking of art.  Although some could argue particular programs are art that is not usually the case.  The craftsman is in love with his medium, rather like an artist, but believes that form and function must be balanced to maximize the profit and usefulness from delivered value.

True craftsmanship, true skill over a medium, is generally learned through the tried and true manner of a skilled craftsman passing on their knowledge to an apprentice.  Mentorship is in my opinion the single best way to become a great programmer.   Mentorship is a process that takes raw potential and pairs that person with other people who can train them and shape their potential into something useful and great.

I am a programmer today because there were people in my life who took the time and energy to provide mentorship.  First my father and brother helped introduce me into the world of programming and were there for support and also for kicking me in the rear and telling me to “do it myself”.  There were other mentors who helped me push outside my limits into other programming languages, mentors who encouraged me to begin speaking and writing.  Along the way I learned another truth.

Mentoring does not only help the apprentice, it helps out the mentor as well. Passing on your skills to another can help you in more ways than you can imagine. The partnership can increase the network of people that both mentor and apprentice have access to. The intrinsic good feelings generated from knowing you helped someone.  And above all your apprentice provides fresh eyes and a new perspective on what you have already done.

But it’s hard to meet new people.  So hard in fact there are hundreds of dating sites and social networks and other websites devoted to doing nothing more than helping match people up.  It can be as hard to find someone to mentor you as it is to find someone to marry you, after all mentorship is a relationship.

From that need phpmentoring was born.  I had started doing a talk at some conferences on mentoring in general, how it works for me, how to deal with it in open source, how to do mentoring in a business or organization.  And after the talk I had lots of questions with the primary one being “how do I find a mentor”.  Meeting new people is hard enough, but meeting new people who have a specific skill you want to learn who are willing to teach it to you?

I created an irc channel on freenode and named it phpmentoring – simply because most of the conferences I speak at are PHP centric.  A quick shout out on twitter and there were 30 people in the channel.  There was most definitely a need for a place for people to meet up.  Using resources on github for wiki and site hosting, irc for general discussions the idea for phpmentoring grew rapidly from some friends on twitter to an active website, wiki, repositories with information resources, and a “PHP dating service” to help match up people who want to mentor others, or be mentored.

I’m continuing my work with mentoring – speaking at conferences about the importance of mentoring, telling people about phpmentoring (and mentoring in general) and doing my part with my own mentors and apprentices.  I’m also involved in other open source projects including php-gtk, winapi for php, and many others.  In my “day job” I’ve had the privilege of working on a very diverse set of projects from internal manufacturing tools, to performance monitoring clients, to Wikipedia.

At the end of the day, I don’t work because I have to, I work because I want to, because I need to improve the technology that people use every day.  The tools and techniques used today won’t be the ones used 20 years from now, so I don’t believe in holy wars over languages, operating systems, or coding standards.

Balancing pragmatism and idealism in code is something I practice on a daily basis, and I wish more people would learn to find that balance, or at least take the effort to look for that balance.

I believe that everything I gain from contributing to the Open Source community I need to give back, to pass on what I’ve been given.  That will take me a lifetime.

When I decided to start blogging I was faced with some choices. The first choice to be made was which blogging software to use. I have had some experience using Wordpress and have never been too happy with it. I have also used Joomla, which I don’t think is too well suited to blogging. I figured I would give Drupal a try. It was ok, but ultimately left me with the same feeling as Wordpress.

Then I discovered something that made me say “Yes, this is it”. That something was Octopress. As a developer, I am comfortable doing things on the command line, performing builds and deploys. This is exactly the type of user Octopress targets. In fact, here is a quote from the Octopress documentation:

First, I want to stress that Octopress is a blogging framework for hackers. You should be comfortable running shell commands and familiar with the basics of Git. If that sounds daunting, Octopress probably isn’t for you.

Now that I had decided on using Octopress, I next needed to figure out where to host it. One of the services I have been hearing a lot about that I have been wanting to play with is Engine Yard, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to try them out as a potential home for my blog. In checking the Octopress documentation, they list several deployment options but none of them are Engine Yard. So, here’s how I managed to deploy my Octopress blog to Engine Yard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud.

Step 1: Setup a Github account if you don’t already have one

The documentation is your friend here. https://help.github.com/articles/signing-up-for-a-new-github-account

Step 2: Setup a new Github repository

https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo

Step 3: Setup Octopress

Simply follow the steps at the Octopress website to get setup. You can ignore the “Next Steps” section at the bottom as that is basically what I am going to go through.

Step 4: Add Github as a remote repository

git remote add github ssh://git@github.com/{your Github username}/{repo name from step 6}.git example: git remote add github ssh://git@github.com/pmeth/methlog.git

Step 5: Create a new blog post

rake new_post["Post Title"]

Step 6: Generate the static pages

rake generate

Step 7: Remove the public directory from the .gitignore file

grep -v ^public$ .gitignore > .gitignore2 && mv .gitignore2 .gitignore

Step 8: Commit your generated blog

git add -A && git commit -m 'writing first blog post'

Step 9: Push your blog up to Github

git push github master

Step 10: Sign up for Engine Yard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud

https://login.engineyard.com/signup/orchestra?locale=en

Step 11: Deploy an App

Click the button to Deploy an Orchestra PHP Application. The free one is sufficient for now, but if you decide you like the service or need to use some of the advanced features, you should consider signing up for their paid service.

When setting up the App, you will be asked for your app name (this will become the subdomain if using the Free account), your Github public repo url, the branch name and the index file. Make sure the index file is public/index.html then click Launch App.

After a minute or two of waiting, Engine Yard should have pulled down your blog from Github and launched it on their servers for you to enjoy. The Orchestra control panel will give you a link to the website, which is labelled “Public Hostname”. You can click on it to view your newly created blog.

To make any changes to your blog you simply make changes to the appropriate page under source/_posts, run rake generate, commit your changes then git push github master. After a few minutes, Engine Yard will sense the updates, and automatically apply the changes.

That’s it.

The nice thing about hosting your blog on Engine Yard is that if you write a popular blog post that gets “Slashdotted” or makes it to the front page of Hacker News, Engine Yard will automatically scale up to meet the demand (note this feature is not available on free apps) and your blog won’t take down your server. When the traffic dies down, it will automatically scale back down again.

We are committed to keeping your apps running on the latest and greatest version of PHP. After careful lab testing, we'll upgrade your apps as newer versions of PHP become available.

What if you’re still using PHP 5.3? Don’t worry, Orchestra PHP Cloud will continue to maintain its PHP 5.3 stack. You will be able to choose which version of PHP you would like to use when you launch a new app. PHP 5.4 is now the default for new applications.

We’re excited to be offering this functionality and even more excited about the new features and enhancements in PHP 5.4. To learn more, please visit our documentation.

If you'd like to learn more about PHP 5.4 you can see Davey Shafik, one of our engineers introducing all of the new PHP 5.4 features at PHP UK earlier this year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6QtuLBwux4

During the meeting, one of the organizers named Kevin Roberts gave a brief history of the group and where it came from. It was very interesting to see its ups and downs, and various moving around of venues and organizers because of changing circumstances. The group has gone from just a few people meeting in someone’s house many years ago, to a regular turnout of 40-50 people, and branded merchandise. I know some of you are on various journeys with your own user groups, and if you’re struggling to grow the group or get the word out, these guys are the ones you need to talk to!

Currently the group has found a home in a local co-working space called Strongbox West. Spaces like these are popping up everywhere, so if you're trying to start a group, or grow the one that is already in your area, this might be a great solution for you. Many times they are very accommodating to user groups, and can serve as a regular, stable home for your meetings. Consistency is really the key, and having one location that people can count on and become comfortable with is a big step toward getting them to come out on a regular basis.

Anyone who says that PHP is dead, or that exciting things aren't going on have obviously not been to a user group meeting like the Atlanta PHP group. There are so many people working on cool projects, and the group is such a cohesive unit, it makes me very hopeful for the future of the industry. These guys go above and beyond their normal 9-to-5 day job and really make awesome things happen. They are one of the reasons we love the PHP community.

To Chris Spruck, Kevin Roberts, and Nic Rosental: keep up the great work, guys. You make PHP better every day.

With shared storage, provided by our new storage add-on, you can write files out from your application, and read them again from any one of your app servers.

Maintaining state in a stateless, distributed environment is tricky. And just like an external database can be used to persist data to, a centralised storage system can be useful to persist files to. And a storage system you can mount locally is even more useful.

Storage can be allocated to any of your running apps:

To attach storage to an app, simply head to the Add-ons section, and enable the storage add-on. Navigate to Manage Addon, and click Create Storage. After you’ve chosen which type of storage to use, head back to the Manage Addon screen, and attach your storage to an app. Your app servers will then be able to access your storage from a local mount point.

Read more about shared storage for your apps in our docs.

With this new feature, you can now update your application name, domain, index file, and repository information. This includes switching from Subversion to Git and vice-versa.

All changes are made with zero downtime, and in a minimal amount of time (this will be dictated by the size of your repository and DNS changes).

Along with this change, we have made some changes to your app interface. To accommodate the extra functionality we have condensed all application actions into a popover menu, which you can see below:

With these new changes, you can now change most of your application settings without the need to relaunch your applications.

Read more about updating your applications in our docs.

Encryption is something that should be used whenever an app is handling sensitive data. Whether that’s your data, or even your users' data. Even something as simple as a login session needs to be protected with encryption, to protect against session hijacking.

With Orchestra’s SSL support, you can attach a certificate to an elastic app in a matter of minutes. And in addition to enjoying industry standard encryption, your app will auto-heal and auto-scale as usual. Deploying secure PHP apps to the cloud has never been easier.

To add an SSL certificate, simply head to the Addons section, and enable the SSL addon. Navigate to Manage Addon, and select the relevant application. From here, you can enter the certificate details. Save your certificate, and your application is ready to go.

Read more about getting SSL for your apps in our docs.

Engine Yard is thrilled to be part of a brand new conference: CodeConnexx. It's a two-day conference hosted by our friends at PHPWomen, but this is not just a conference for women in PHP. It's open to anybody working in the web development industry. What makes this conference different is that the first day is focused on technical topics, like MySQL Query Optimization and Building APIs with Silex, while the second day focuses on softer skills like Mentoring Developers and the Art of Self-Sourcing. Not surprisingly, the goal of this conference is building connections: between work and life, between different technologies used in web development, and between each other.

How did the group get started?

The AustinPHP group got started about 10 years ago with a few people showing up every month in coffee shops around town. The original creator has since moved on, but we have several of the original members who have been attending for over 9 years.

What is a typical meeting like?

We have two meetings a month. Our learning/sharing focused meeting is the 2nd Thursday of every month. During this meeting we encourage members to speak about topics they care about. We have a pool of experienced speakers in Austin to draw from, so we try to intersperse these throughout the year. Our second meeting is on a different night, normally on the 4th Wed. It is a social group, or the Subgroup as we call it, focused on getting to know one another over beers. It is a great networking opportunity that doesn't distract from the learning focused meetings.

What kinds of resources do you offer to your members?

We are in the process of building a set of approved training and reference materials for our members, no matter what their skillset is. In the past, one of our most experienced members, Josh Butts, has taught classes on PHP. We give out lots of free stuff. Tshirts are very popular. We are hoping to do another batch this year.  We have a book sponsor with enough to last a year. We have awarded through contests or raffled off tickets to PHP conferences. What I think everyone appreciates the most thou is all the free beer at the Subgroup every month.

What's the structure like of the group? Is it pretty informal, or do you have a more formal structure?

We have two organizers (Josh Butts and Logan Lindquist) who run things and the rest of it is pretty informal.

What makes your group so awesome?

The web community in Austin is the best in the world. I think a large part of what makes the group so awesome is where we live and who lives here.

What advice would you give to someone starting their own group?

Pick a night that, ideally, doesn't conflict with any other group. If your group is related to an already existing group, talk with the other leaders in the community to let them know your intentions. Most of the larger groups would rather be inclusive instead of exclusive. Splinter groups just hurt the larger community as a whole.

We are happy to be sponsoring their meeting on August 9, and speaking about Lithium. We'll also have plenty of swag and festivities on hand. If you'd like us to consider your group for the User Group of the Month, please make sure you join the PHP User Group Program.

The conference will be hitting 10 cities total:

• Buffalo
• Philadelphia
• Cincinnati
• Atlanta
• Boca Raton
• Madison
• Memphis
• Dallas
• Denver
• Los Angeles

If you're in and around these areas, you can help us spread the word, and we hope that you'll be there. We will be at each venue and we'd love to see you!

For more information about the conference, we encourage you to visit the CodeWorks site, or read their blog announcement.