As of this week, Mikko Koppanen works in our Ibuildings UK team. Mikko is known from his Imagick extension, a wrapper to use ImageMagick in PHP.

The nice thing about this is that now we finally have someone on board who knows how to write PHP extensions.

A few weeks ago, Stefan Koopmanschap joined our Dutch team. Stefan is, among other things, in the board of the Dutch PHP User Group, and maintains the Dutch Symfony site.

With these 2 additions to our team, our PHP army is growing steadily, allowing us to continuously improve our support to companies in the UK and The Netherlands that are taking PHP seriously. PHP is rapidly moving into the realm of big corporations, and this means that there's a lot of demand for PHP professionals.

In the past weeks, we've been in contact with several major Dutch websites that are planning to move from java or .net to PHP, which is a very good sign.

Also, we've started working with several Computer Science institutes to add PHP to their curriculum. Most of them are already doing things with PHP, but often this is limited to very basic applications, a CMS, a blog etc. We're now helping them to breed better PHP programmers by teaching proper OO, Design Patterns, MVC, frameworks etc.

Traditionally, these institutes have been Java and .NET oriented, and we hope this will help show more people how PHP is a viable language for serious web applications.

[marketing mode] If you want to join us in our efforts to bring PHP to the business world, we still have openings [/marketing mode]

It's been 7 years since I started to work for Ibuildings. Back then, they were an average development startup, focussed on delivering web applications, and they were using this fairly new, experimental, open source scripting language called PHP3.

It's fun to see how a company can grow with a language. I've seen PHP go from PHP3 to PHP4 and later from PHP4 to PHP5, and in the meanwhile, Ibuildings' focus has shifted more and more from a development shop to a PHP service company. Companies that used to be our competitors, gradually became our customers. And we've grown from a 3 people group to a crowd of 48.

And I'm proud (and not too shy) to say that at the moment, we are the only 100% PHP service company in The Netherlands, with projects ranging from plain old development and outplacement, to training and consultancy (audits, development methodology implementation, architecture etc.). And promoting PHP in general, with events such as the DPC earlier this year.

Last year I was very proud when Zend made us their official representative in The Netherlands. Besides the fact that we can now sell Zend products and services, which is nice for our sales people, I was particularly fond of this, as it confirmed that we must have been doing something right.

And now we're happy to announce we're going to do something left.

Recently we've seen increasing demand for PHP services in the UK. The adoption of open source in the UK has been a bit slower than on the European mainland, but PHP is finally gaining momentum there.
And if there's a market for PHP, there's a market for PHP services.

So now we are not only 'Ibuildings.nl BV', but also 'Ibuildings UK Ltd', and we have a home in London. Whoot! PHP on the right and on the left side of the road.

We already have a small group there doing cool things with PHP. And we're happy to have bright people such as Gavin Lee Foster, the author of Xinc on board.

I'm not bragging entirely without a reason. We are hiring. We have job openings in both the Netherlands and the UK. And we have plans in several other European countries as well (servicing those primarily from the UK and NL for now).

So if you're above average in terms of PHP skills, have good communication skills, and you want to use those skills not only to develop, but also to help others learn to see the power of PHP, send us proof of your skills, and an up to date resume, and we'll be in touch.

We eventually managed to hire Bart Helms, the lead developer of the web 2.0 time tracking site 14Dayz.com.

We won't take over 14Dayz, as that site remains with the company Bart worked for, but we do hope that adding Bart to our team will help improve Achievo's usability, and also bring some more web 2.0 stuff to ATK and our other products (which, I promise, we will use wisely and subtly).

In a time where many web 2.0 sites seem to be built using Ruby on Rails, it is interesting to note that Bart developed 14Dayz entirely in PHP.

I wish Bart the best of luck at Ibuildings, I hope he will enjoy working here as much as I do.

What we are looking for is someone who is fluent in PHP, knows a fair share of Software Engineering theory, is accustomed to using and applying design patterns and knows his/her way in emerging technologies such as Ajax. Also you believe that Web 2.0 actually is happening.

Social skills are important too, and ofcourse living in The Netherlands or the willingness to move here are essential. Being a ZCE is recommendable. However if you are not, but can prove you're capable of doing professional development in PHP, that's ok too. After working with us for 6 months, we allow you to take the exam and get certified.

What we offer is the possibility to work in a passionate team of PHP developers, work on new and existing technologies, on open source projects such as Achievo and ATK and on interesting internet-related projects (small and large).

If you are interested, please send a resume to jobs at ibuildings.nl.

For this reason, Zend invited me to take part in their webcast about the PHP Job Market on august 24. I'm looking forward to it. If all goes well, there will also be a case study about ibuildings on Zend.com soon.

Some other bits of news: we've attracted 2 sponsors for the Achievo project management tool. The next few months we will be building quite some interesting features, among which finally a completion of the billing module, an Open Office export/template feature, an upgrade to ATK5 and parts of the 'task based time-registration' we've been planning for almost 2 years now.

The next release of ATK is around the corner. I've got some contributed translations to add, but besides that, the next release is almost ready.