NYCPHP Meetup

[Rob Wilkens]

Hi .

I'm new here (though I recognize one or two familiar names from
another list i'm on - LIPHP) --

When I subscribed to the list, there was a link to the
Charter/Appropriate Use Policy for the list, but the link was broken.
I thought someone who manages the list server might want to know.
>From memory, I think the link was http://www.nyphp.org/charter - I
received back a 404 Not found error.

A little about me as long as i'm writing (relating to PHP):  I learned
PHP because I was home sick from work (for 5 years and counting) and
when Tom Melendez started the LIPHP group on Long Island, after seeing
repeated announcements for his group on another server i'm subscribed
to (LILUG), I finally decided to see what it was about and was excited
to see the language was just like C in many ways, except it was being
used for the web (primarily).  C was a language I liked because when I
graduated in 1996 I had taken a few classes in C(including one on
Linux Kernel Hacking, which landed me a job doing UNIX kernel hacking
for a few years).  Anyway, I've put it off for a long time, and
finally decided to formalize my knowledge of PHP by taking a college
class on it at Farmingdale State (on Long Island), which Tom was
supposed to be teaching, but his section of the class had little
interest and was cancelled.  My professor is on this mailing list too.

In addition to the class, I currently have a paying PHP project (and
C#, I'll explain in a second), which i'm doing with my one and only
customer : Anritsu Company.  My project is a C# client (Windows Forms)
which talks to a PHP-script on the linux server, and manages contacts
in a heirarchy (read: tree structure) -- i.e. so my customer knows who
works for who within their customer's companies (i.e. So they can
follow the "food chain" of their customers.)  I talk to my server in a
pseudo-xml structure.  Requests from client to server come in
$_POST["variable"], and responses are loosely xml (may not have
propper xml headers, etc. and no documented stylesheets or data
definitions and the like.)  I've been thinking of making a public demo
of the project, but I've been having difficulty finding the time to
set up a test database on an isolated server on the net.

I'm also participating in the Zend Certification study group by LIPHP
and am hoping to have a Zend Certification by the end of February or
March (I'm passing the practice tests now.)

Well, I've been talking about myself here wayyyy to long, at least now
it's out of my system.  In short: I'm still learning PHP and hope I
can continue to learn from you all too.  I'm not hoping to be (at this
time) an ace web developer, I'm more of a hobbyist who is actually
getting paid to do some PHP.  I'll try to stay out of the way when I
realize I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not here looking for
trouble.

-Rob
p.s. I attended (paid my own way) the NYPHP Conference last year, but
I walked out after the first talk (Rasmus Lerdorf?).  Had nothing to
do with the quality of the conference, I was just in a different place
in life then and it wasn't right for me.  Were the same conference
held today, trust me, I'd stay -- I actually stayed through the whole
Microsoft Windows Vista Launch celebration at the Nokia Theater this
past Monday, not quite the same thing but I handled myself well and
lasted a few hours.