Postcards From My Life

Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference

Cal Evans — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:16:42 +0000

Dear Reader, I sit here this morning working on my sixth PHP conference (ZendCon 06, 07, 08, DPC 09, tekx and now ZendCon 10) I have to sit back and reflect on how lucky I am. I get paid to help select the sessions that developers from around the world will sit in and learn [...]

Software development DSL

Cal Evans — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:24:41 +0000

Dear Reader, [Author's Note: Fridays should be fun. If you are a manager, try taking one Friday a month and let your developers do whatever they want. Trust them to do something but don't give them any parameters at all. See what they dream up.] When I venture out into the real world, the one [...]

5 PHP twitter accounts that have replaced my feed reader

Cal Evans — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:05:54 +0000

I have given up on feed readers. I never did like them much to begin with and have found over the past couple of years that twitter does a better job of showing me interesting blog posts than Google Reader ever did. In addition to recommendations from friends however, there are a hand full of accounts that I follow to keep up with what is going on. So here is my #followFriday for the next few weeks all wrapped into a single blog post.

Putting all the pieces together

Cal Evans — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:00:21 +0000

Dear Reader, I have posted several posts on this blog that all derived from a sample app that I wrote to generate QR Codes using the Google API. So far I’ve only give you the individual pieces, this post is about pulling them all together and creating the application. I have been working on this [...]

PHP, Community and User Groups

Cal Evans — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:21:55 +0000

Dear Reader, Those that know me know that the PHP community is near and dear to my heart. I am always looking for ways to support it, usually to the chagrin of my employer. We have the greatest community of any programming language I know of and I like helping people find ways to participate [...]

Working with windows in Flex

Cal Evans — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:00:25 +0000

Dear Reader, I am putting the finishing touches on my reference application to demonstrate my wrapper for Google’s QR Code API. While doing so I decided to see what it would take to have the image pop up in a new window. Originally I had it displaying on the right side of the main window [...]

Actionscript class to create QR Codes

Cal Evans — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:00:30 +0000

Dear Reader, Anyone that knows me knows that I love new toys. Sometimes it’s a new piece of hardware or a new game. Sometimes however, it is just a idea to play with. This post is all about an idea. I’ve been intrigued by QR Codes for a while. Actually, my love of bar codes [...]

Flyte World Dining and Wine

Cal Evans — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:38:18 +0000

Dear Reader, I don’t think I have ever done a restaurant review on this blog so this will be a first. The story so far… This story started back in early May. Every now and then I like to take the lovely and talented Kathy out to a nice restaurant, most of the time to [...]

Migrating Flex components to Flex Libraries

Cal Evans — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:00:16 +0000

Dear Reader, Recently I decided to consolidate all of the custom and reusable controls I had created in Flex into a single library. Even as good as Eclipse is at refactoring (one of the things it actually does well) it still wasn’t was clear cut of a procedure as I had hoped for. Step 1: [...]

An entirely unscientific look at why people attend conferences.

Cal Evans — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:00:57 +0000

Dear Reader, Those of you who follow me on twitter (@calevans) know that recently I asked for opinions on conference attendance. I’ve collected what I learned in this blog post. Who I asked Speakers First I asked my friends who were speakers why they attended. I got a lot of good answers but most were [...]