Professional PHP developer

Being connected to start-up environment for the past few years, there were some lessons taken that i would like to share with you, and one of the most important must be “Your roadmap shouldn’t have a pause function”. I already written about the no follow of a roadmap issue, on my “5 signs that may lead your startup to failure” post , now i will take a little deeper on it.

Your roadmap shouldn’t have a pause function

A huge percentage of start-ups that i know have a well defined road-map with objective goals attached to it, goals that, when achieved, will make the start-up a success. Surprisingly there is the agile excuse to abandon the roadmap in pursue of instant trends. This behavior will be extremely dangerous, because this decision will be made using strong emotional feelings, ignoring the long weeks, even months, spent planning the company road-map.

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For the past 3 days, between 11 and 13 of November, i had been at Codebits 2010, and let me share with you, was such a great event. As a short opinion i would just say the following, if you haven’t been to a Codebits yet, please make it on your agenda for 2011, you will not regret, year after year a greater event.

Photo by Sara Santos

Great content

The event talks were divided by 4 concurrent stages, that means some chooses need to be made. Here’s what i attended and my opinion on it. You should check out the event calendar at the event page and watch the videos from most of the talks, it really worth your time.

Day 1 – Mahout, Activity Streams and How to talk to marketing people

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PHP version 5.3 introduced a new magic method designed __invoke, this method is called when a script tries to call an object as a function.

The __invoke magic method

< ?php
 
class Car {
 
	public function __invoke($v) 
	{
		echo "Just called object as function with parameter '".$v."'\n";
	}
 
}
 
$c	=	new Car;
 
// Just to make sure we have an object
echo "I am an object of type: ".get_class($c)."\n";
 
// Now let's use it as a function
$c('ford');

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Cache_Lite is one of the fast, light and reliable cache system for PHP. It’s an extremely easy and small learning curve system to work with. This post will try to make you a light introduction to PHP Cache_Lite.

Installing PEAR Cache_Lite

In order to work with Cache_Lite you need to install the PEAR package.

pear install Cache_Lite-1.7.8

Starting with Cache_Lite

Is easy as instantiating the object to start using Cache_Lite.
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While freelancing for the past months i often listened repeated ideas, dangerous ideas on my perspective. That made me start thinking on  writing something about it. There are some signs that will most probably increase the risk of failure on your startup if you don’t change your mind about it:

Sign 1: You strongly believe that the business can’t live without you

You must pass this own dependency syndrome, what will happen to your startup when you’re on vacations ? Or even if you got hit by a train and got on a hospital bed for several months ? Even if your work is extremely important on the company, please be sure that you have a backup plan for when you are not working on it.

Sign 2: You think that a roadmap is only bureaucracy or you have it on the wall but don’t follow it

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