The Ibuildings techPortal has published the latest episode of their DPCRadio series (as recorded at the Dutch PHP Conference 2011) - Aral Balkan's keynote session The Art of the User Experience: making beautiful, delightful, fun things.

In this session, Aral Balkan will outline the important role that user experience design plays in the making of virtual products and inspire you to see that it is your job - regardless of whether you make web sites, mobile apps, intranet systems, or ticket machines - to make this new world that we are crafting together not only usable and accessible but beautiful, fun, inspiring, pleasurable, delightful, and - dare I say - magical.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site, they've posted the latest episode of their "DPC Radio" series (as recorded at the 2011 Dutch PHP Conference) - Rowan Merewood's session "TDD and Getting Paid".

Test-driven development is generally regarded as a good move: it should result in simple decoupled design, your tests tend to cover behaviour not methods, and far fewer bugs. However, just getting unit tests in on a real, commercial project is hard - switching to TDD is even harder. [...] So, instead of beating ourselves up about not being perfect let's look at an interactive approach to adopting TDD principles. We'll look at tactics for selling TDD to your client, boss and colleagues. This talk will also cover methods for making TDD easier for you by showing you what tools you can use to integrate it into your development environment.

You can listen to this new session recording through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've published the latest in their DPC Radio podcast series, sessions as recorded at the 2011 edition of the Dutch PHP Conference. In this latest episode Sebastian Bergmann talks about "Clean PHP".

Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. In this session you will learn how you can offset your technical debt with clean code that is readable and testable as well as reusable.

You can listen to this latest session either using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. The slides (for a similar version of the presentation) can be found on Slideshare.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest in their DPC Radio series of podcasts as recorded at last year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this new episode they share Lorna Mitchell's talk "Implementing OAuth".

With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can follow along with the presentation in her slides.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode in their DPC Radio series as recorded at the last Dutch PHP Conference. In this new episode they share a session from Tobias Schlitt called "Advanced OO Patterns".

You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can follow along with the talk in his slides over on the qafoo.com site.

The Ibuildings techPortal has posted the latest episode of their recordings from this year's Dutch PHP Conference - Derick Rethans' talk "Profiling PHP Applications".

The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can also page through his slides as you listen.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode of their DPC Radio series of podcasts, recordings of sessions from this year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this new episode they share the presentation by Kore Nordmann "Distributed Couch Apps - Embracing eventual consistency".

CouchDB is a prominent representative of the NoSQL movement. Using its integrated web server and eventual consistent replication you can not only distribute data, but also full application code. This even works for clients which are not always connected to the internet, like e.g. mobile devices. This session gives you an insight Couch apps, their beauty and pitfalls.

You can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. You can find his slides over on talks.qafoo.com.

The Ibuildings techPortal ha sposted their latest episode in the DPC Radio podcast series - recordings of sessions from the Dutch PHP Conference earlier this year. This episode is a recording of a talk from Paul Matthews about "Searching with Solr".

With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. The slides for the presentation can be found here on SlideShare.

The Ibuildings techPortal has posted the summary of Day 2 of the Dutch PHP Conference from Marco De Bortoli with some of his experiences from this year's event.

This year as part of the Ibuildings team I attended the Dutch PHP Conference for the first time. What can I say? Well, it was an unbelievable experience; I enjoyed every moment spent there. [...] There was also the high quality of the presented talks, but also for the great opportunity to spend good time with my colleagues at Ibuildings and people from other companies all around the world.

He mentions some talks specifically like Helgi's "First Class APIs", "Managing MySQL" by Thijs Feryn, a look at Modular Architecture from Kore Nordmann and Tobias Schlitt as well as David Zülke's map reduce session.

One thing I really appreciated about DPC was the Open Source and Open Knowledge spirit found there. Speakers were not there just only to talk and present something, they were there more to share their own knowledge and to share ideas and maybe a new solution to their problems. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things I took with me from DPC.

In a new post to the Ibuildings techPortal today, Patrick van der Velden shares some of his thoughts about one of the presentations given at this year's Dutch PHP Conference - Think like an ant, distribute the workload.

[Helgi's] presentation started off explaining to us why distributing can be a good thing by pointing out three significant aspects: budget, efficiency and perception. Budget-wise, for a distributed application there is no need to invest in a big, expensive and hard to maintain server that runs the entire application by itself. A company can save a significant amount of money investing in a collection of smaller or virtual servers or even use "the cloud".

Patrick goes on to mention some of the other key points Helgi made about distributing the workload out from a point of user contact to other "workers", decoupling your application into functional pieces, designing for distributed computing from the start and making internal APIs between the sections of the application to make communication simpler. The slides of Helgi's presentation are also posted on Slideshare.