Wow, February was busy!
After telling you what we were looking forward to last month, we thought that you might like to hear what we enjoyed most and what we have learned from all of the events we attended.
“I went to Usability Testing How To’s for Small Teams (& Little Budgets) – held by Grinblo which has been really appropriate for our latest work with thomsonlocal, where we are redesigning an existing business process. I learned to write contextual scenarios around tasks and how to behave when administering testing – how to observe and take constructive notes. I am now keen to focus more of my professional development around this and come up with a process for UVd to use for all clients in the future.”
“The best talk of the PHP Conference for me was ‘(Re)discovering the SPL’ by Joshua Thijssen. It was really enlightening to hear about an area of the PHP core that is seldom used by myself. It was also pretty funny to hear about the ridiculous naming conventions in PHP; namely ‘RecursiveIteratorIterator’ – WTF!? Aside from being funny, I learned a lot from the talk about the Traversable and Iterator PHP interfaces.
In terms of what I will bring back to UVd from the conference, there is too much to list, but I’m looking forward to using some of the new PHP 5.6 techniques such as variadic functions, the splat operator, and although I can’t currently see where I would use them, namespace functions sounds pretty cool!”
“During the PHP Conference I particularly enjoyed “The Seven Deadly Sins of Dependency Injection” as Dependency Injection is something I didn’t know a whole lot about, so it was good to get a greater understanding. Both “Caching Best Practices” and “Web Security and You” by Eli White were also very helpful. I am keen to use what I learned about caching in practice at UVd.
I’m also going to have a play with Google App Engine, thanks to the $2000 credit they gave us!”