Winner of PHP Programming Innovation Award of the year announced - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

* O'Reilly Open Source Conference discounts

* WebDevPub sponsors the innovation award giving Javascript magazine subscriptions

* Innovation Award all time winners and countries ranking

* Interview with Cesar Rodas, the Innovation Award winner of 2008


* O'Reilly Open Source Conference discounts

Before moving on the to actual subject of this article, just a quick note about O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) that will happen on July, in San Jose, California.

This event has whole PHP session tracks besides track about other languages and Open Source technologies.

Just got a notice from O'Reilly to that if you want to attend the event you may benefit from 20% discount by going to the registration page and using this discount code: os09usrg

https://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/register?CMP=EMC-con ...


* WebDevPub sponsors the innovation award giving Javascript magazine subscriptions

WebDevPub is a company recently formed by Michael Kimsal, a well known PHP developer that has podcast named WebDevRadio.

http://www.webdevradio.com/

Recently he launched two magazines named GroovyMag and JSMag with articles about Groovy and Javascript languages respectively.

From now on, WebDevPub will be sponsoring the PHP Programming Innovation award. They will be giving away an yearly subscription of JSMag as prize. Since most PHP developer have to deal with Javascript one way or the other, this seems like a very interesting prize.

http://www.jsmag.com/

Also of the interest Web developers in general, Michael has a new podcast named WebDevGeekly co-hosted by Mikeal Rogers, Adam Christian and Matthew Eernisse that are known developers of other communities.

If you are interested to hear about the latest discussions about Web development, you may want to follow also this podcast:

http://webdevgeekly.com/


* Innovation Award all time winners and countries ranking

From now on, the PHP Programming Innovation Award features new types of rankings, besides the regular yearly ranking by individual author.

Now you can see in the main winners page a new top ranking that considers the scores of all nominees for all time since the award was started in 2004.

http://www.phpclasses.org/winners/

In the same page you can also see award country rankings. They show the top countries considering the scores that were gathered by authors of each country. There are both all time country rankings and yearly country rankings in the respective year pages.

Hopefully these rankings will encourage more authors to contribute with innovative classes so can raise in the all time ranking as well their own countries.


* Interview with Cesar Rodas, the Innovation Award winner of 2008

Cesar Rodas is the winner of the PHP Programming innovation award of 2008:

http://www.phpclasses.org/winners/year/2008/

As as in the last year, Cesar Rodas, was interviewed about his participation and the benefits of winning the award.

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/75-And-the-award-winner- ...

The results of the award were available in February when the winners of the December 2008 were known. However, this interview was delayed to give time for prize to arrive to where Cesar lives, so he can send a nice picture of him holding the prize.

As you may see by the picture below, the prize this year was an ElePHPant, this time the large version of the ElePHPant plush toy.

http://files.phpclasses.org/graphics/cesar_rodas_2008_innova ...

Now lets move on to the interview:

PC: PHPClasses (Manuel Lemos)
CR: Cesar Rodas

PC: Cesar once again you are the winner of the PHP Programming Innovation Award of the year in 2008 like in 2007. Congratulations!

Can you tell what is your secret? Where do you get inspiration to create so many classes that are innovative and appreciated by so many users that voted on your classes?

CR: Thanks. In fact there is no secret. I am always reading a lot of blogs and "googling" to get inspiration for fresh ideas to create new PHP projects, or port existing projects from other language implementations, like for instance my brand new Git class.


PC: So, what motivates you to come up with so many innovative classes?

CR: Most of the time because I need a certain class to solve a particular problem. Then when it is ready, I share it to get feedback from the users and improve it.

The main motivation to make my work publicly available is to receive feedback from users that find my work useful. Also, many times they also pay me for support, implement features and fix bugs.


PC: Can you tell what do you think other developers should do to also come up with so many innovative classes? You mentioned you "google" a lot for new ideas, but what is your method to determine whether a new idea will result in an innovative class that will be appreciated by many PHP developers?

CR: What I usually do to get fresh ideas is to read blogs related about technology trends, read RFCs (Request For Comments) about new protocols, new formats, and white papers. Also, when I have some spare time, I browse repositories of packages for other languages to find what could be useful to implement in PHP.

Then when I get a good list of interesting ideas, I analyze which would be worth implementing before I decide to code them in PHP.


PC: Great. Did the Innovation Award of the year, that you also won in 2007, bring you recognition that helped you getting better jobs?

CR: Yes, I got several local job proposals. I also got a proposal to work abroad in Brazil, but we are still in negotiations.

Beyond the current steady job that Innovation award helped me to get, it also get me a lot of recognition. In my current job I was sent to the Netherlands for a course about computer networking.

I also got contacts from well known companies that found my projects on the Web. For instance, Automattic (developers of Wordpress) became interested to sponsor my work in an Open Source project that I created named PHPLibtextcat.

http://github.com/crodas/phplibtextcat

Even more important than that, I just was selected as student to participate in the Google Summer of Code. For the second time I will contribute to a very well known PHP project: Wordpress

http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/wordpres ...

Besides that, last year I was also invited again to give talks in important PHP and Open Source events in Brazil like CONAPHP and Latinoware.

http://www.conaphp.com.br/

http://www.latinoware.org/


PC: So, can you tell more about great projects you are working on, besides those that you submitted to PHPClasses?

CR: Besides PHPClasses submissions, currently I am working mainly on two projects.

The first is about text categorization, also known as supervised learning, and text clustering, known as unsupervised learning. My goal is to create by the end of the year a library in C to do this in a efficient manner, and then create bindings to using from PHP script.

The other project is create several PHP native extensions. A native extension is a library written in C that can be called from PHP. I have a bunch of ideas that I will be coding during this year.

I also have plans for PHP projects such as one to create a PHP to Javascript compiler. Soon I will announce it on my blog about it.

http://cesar.la/

These are my main goals for this year.


PC: It sounds like those are very interesting projects. So, would you be interested to get more job proposals? If so, what interested companies would need to do to contact you to send the proposals?

CR: Yes, of course. I am very interesting to work abroad, or work remotely. Any interested companies may contact me by going to my professional profile page in the PHPClasses site:

http://www.phpclasses.org/professionals/profile/2/

If you want to see my complete resume you cam find it here:

http://www.cesarodas.com/


PC: OK. Congratulations again for your award and thank you for the interview.

CR: Thank you for the interview, for creating such a great site as PHPClasses, and for the PHP Innovation award.