I'm attending the UK PHP Conference in London next month. At approx. 72 euro entrance fee, and with only 40 euro worth of planetickets (ok, plus 60 euro airport tax but even then), this must be one of the cheapest conferences ever.

I'm very interested in Derick's talk about eZ components, as it has similarities to ATK, and some of the components seem very useful.

If any ATK users are attending, I'd be happy to meet you there. Just drop me a note.

Oh, and by the way:

[proud]

I'm among the 'lucky thousand':

Jeeej!

[/proud]

In my previous entry I already talked about how 9 of our employees already were certified, and that 3 were coming up. Right now, we have 12 ZCE's, which makes us the number 1 certified company in The Netherlands. Whoot!

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.

The past few days, I have had several reasons to celebrate.

Last friday, my sister Debby got married. She got married to my colleague and good friend Peter, who some of you know from his Achievo and/or ATK contributions. He's the original author of, among other things, the atkDateAttribute, the locking feature, the PostgreSQL abstraction layer and his latest achievement for ATK was the atkMetaNode. And now he married my sister. Where is the world going...

I got to be her witness, and I drove the wedding car. They both looked really nice in their wedding suits, and they had a very nice party (pictures online soon). Congratulations can be sent to debby at debby.org and peter at achievo.org.

A few days earlier, I passed my Zend Certification Exam. Although I'm not a fan of the questions in the exam (they tend to demonstrate ones ability to learn things out of a book, rather than ones ability to write good code), I'm happy that I didn't flunk it.
My employer decided to get all their php developers certified. I think this will be a strategic advantage over our competition. Right now, of the 27 certified engineers in The Netherlands, 9 work at ibuildings, with 3 more colleages getting ready for their exam next week. We rule!