Postcards From My Life

Live from DrupalCamp Nashville

Cal Evans — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:47:22 +0000

Dear Reader, I’m sitting here in a session at DrupalCamp Nashville on the Vandy campus. The day has been great and the Nashville Drupelars should be commended for running such a great camp. From a conference organizer PoV, this camp has run smoothly. The Wi-Fi is rock solid, the sessions start on time and the [...]

PodcampNashville ‘10 take-aways

Cal Evans — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:15:44 +0000

Dear Reader, The dust has settled, the swag-bag has been rifled through and the drink tickets have all been exchanged for various combinations of kool-aid and vodka. Since I can’t find any of my Microsoft friends who can can me into the beta for the new Microsoft Courier, I had to go old school and take [...]

Podcamp Nashville ‘10 Review

Cal Evans — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:14:35 +0000

Dear Reader, Today was the day! Podcamp Nashville 2010, downtown Nashville at the Cadillac Ranch. As always with the Nashville camps, overall it was great experience. The sessions were quality with speakers like Mitch Canter and Kate Gallagher. It was great to meet some new friends and catch up with some old [...]

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Cal Evans — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:30:44 +0000

Dear Reader, I met Kevlin Henny back in 2007 at the PHPUK Conference in London. (For a year or so I called him Kevin Hennly until I finally got it right) One day out of the blue, Kevlin droped me an email and invites me to participate in a new project he’s working on for O’Reilly, [...]

How I got Zend_Tool working on Windows

Cal Evans — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:30:15 +0000

Dear Reader, I love Zend Framework. I love it so much I wrote the very first book about Zend Framework. (Note: It’s no longer the best Zend Framework book, but still, it’s a good one) I’ve written projects using it and I now find myself teaching another class on it. One of the cool things about [...]

Dynamicly loading images from the web in Flex 3

Cal Evans — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:30:39 +0000

Dear Reader, This weekend’s Flex project was more successful that last weeks. At least the code has survived this far without me declaring it a bust and moving on to the next project. This week’s project involves (among other things) calling an API that returns a graphic and then displaying it on-screen. Being the Flex neophyte I [...]

A Flex 3 custom events primer

Cal Evans — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:30:07 +0000

Dear Reader, I am a web developer. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve done serious desktop application development. So when I fire up Flex Builder to write my first AIR application, it takes a while for things to start coming back to me. One of the things that is only now starting to come back [...]

Open Teams

Cal Evans — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:00:37 +0000

[UPDATE: New Slides posted, the link is below.] Dear Reader, Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not “all of them”, you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free. Put yourself [...]

Failing doesn’t bother me as much as failing to act

Cal Evans — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:33:53 +0000

I don't regret many actions in my life, I do regret a lit of my in-actions, like this one.

MSWDS09

Cal Evans — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:11:40 +0000

Dear Reader, After several years in the PHP Community I’ve come to realize that there are 4 major events on the PHP social calendar, tek, DPC, ZendCon and MSWDS. (Microsoft Web Development Summit) There were 3 MSWDS that took place while I was at Zend and try as I might I could not score an [...]