I'm Willem-Jan. My GitHub and IRC handles are wjzijderveld and my Twitter handle is @willemjanz.
On this blog I try to regularly talk about my experiences with development. To be honest, I tried this before, more than once... But this time it will be different!
This time I'm going to make a list of stuff I want to talk about, and I'm setting a weekly reminder in my agenda to write a blogpost and/or think about more subjects.
As I mentioned in [Working on an OpenSource project](http://blog.willem-jan.net/2012/06/02/working-on-opensource/), I'm somewhat involved with Vespolina. Last weekend we had our first hackweekend, Daniel and I sat together, and Richard and Luis joined us remote. On friday evening we had a conference call where Philipp also joined us. In that conference call we talked a bit about what we wanted to do that weekend.
The biggest change that we did that weekend, was merging some of the libraries together in 1 lirbary. This to make it easier for people to start working with Vespolina, and the make development easier, because maintaining around 40 repositories isn't trivial. Eventually the following libraries got merged into a single library.
So essentially everything that was already done with the CommerceBundle, but now for the libraries.
And I continued working on the new website and a bit on the documentation. The website is almost finished, just needs some more content and probably some minor bugfixes. But the documentation still needs lots of work.
In the coming weeks, I hope to continue working on writing documentation and focus on writing more tests. The combination is probably a good way to learn Vespolina better and hopefully lead to better documentation and tests.
About six months ago, I came to the conclusion that I needed to start thinking about my future. The company I currently work at isn't growing as fast as I am, so I started looking around to see how I could keep improving myself and if that would be possible within this company. I learned a lot in the years I work at the company, and always had a good time. So leaving the company wasn't something I enjoyed thinking about. But after a while I came to the conclusion I need to choose for myself, not for the company.
So I started looking around for the possibilities, trying to find out what options I had in the Netherlands (because... that's were I live). Talked to some people, tried to attend more conferences and user groups. At the same time I started to contribute more to OpenSource. The more people I spoke to and the more I saw and heared how other people were working, the more I had the feeling I should be doing something else, there was so much I wanted to do but wasn't able to at this moment.
I'm hoping to find a job were I can work with Symfony, were I can use TDD and other QA techniques and tools. A job were I can put my hearth and soul in exploring the possibilities of new techniques and implementing those techniques. And if that includes working on and with OpenSource, that would be awesome!
Okay, so I started a new blog again. This time I have the plan to force myself to write a post at least every 2 weeks, but when possible every week. It's going to be hard, especially in the beginning. But I think it's good for me to write down what I'm doing.
As this is the first post, I'll write about the software I used to build this. It's called Sculpin, and it's a static site generator written in PHP. It allows you to create a design with Twig templates and then write posts in any markup language you like (I'm using Markdown).
I like the fact that I can easily write a post now while being offline and just deploy the project when I get online. The lack of a database is just a nice elimination of another thing that can go wrong.
And for syntax highlighting I now use Prism.js. A nice javascript library. Sculpin supports Markdown Extra, so I can do the following:
~~~language-markup
<div id="foo">
<span class="bar">foobar</span>
</div>
~~~
And that will produce:
<div id="foo">
<span class="bar">foobar</span>
</div>
PHP Example:
<?php
$kernel = new AppKernel();
$kernel->handle(Request::createFromGlobals());
$kernel->terminate();
?>
And of course there are more languages it can highlight.
I only haven't figured out how I can use the line-numbers plugin within Markdown.
A few days back, I saw this tweet of Lukas Smith.
has anyone written a #composerphp script to check which installed Bundles are not enabled in the applications #Symfony2 kernel?
At first I just skipped it, thinking ‘Nope, next tweet’. But then I realized, it can’t be that hard, why don’t I build it?
So I started to work on it, and this time I actually finished it (probably because it didn’t take 2 weeks to build). It was a nice little project, got to know Composer a bit better, got some more experience with UnitTesting (still need to write more tests though), had another go with Travis and submitted my first package to packagist.
I hope this gets met going again to actually make time to work on OSS (like Vespolina!).
Github: https://github.com/wjzijderveld/CheckBundles
Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/wjzijderveld/check-bundles
At the company I work at, we have a custom e-commerce platform that’s in a need of replacement. The codebase is more then 6 years old and by now, there are more exceptions that rules. The lack of actual MVC implementation, an ORM or even a DBAL, made maintenance… not very pleasant.
Although we can’t just replace the platform, we did start looking at other options to create a stable base for future development. For new features that included a large bit of backend, we already created a new Symfony2 application. That helped, but didn’t solve the spagetti frontend code. For some new frontend features, we created a REST service in the Symfony2 application, and used that in the old frontend application.
But to be able to create a new solid base for a new frontend we started looking out for options. A completely custom Symfony2 application would simply cost to much for the customer, a almost ready package as Magento is also an option, but we weren’t really excited by the news of Ebay buying Magento.
We also looked at some Symfony2 Open Source projects, like Sylius and Vespolina. Both projects weren’t very far when I started looking. But because Vespolina started more as a Framework, I started to follow that project more closely. After a few conversations on IRC with inspiran and iampersistent, I decided to try and contribute to the project. At that point I had no idea if we ever would be able to use Vespolina at our company, but I liked to project and just wanted to help with an Open Source project.
I started with the Vespolina PartnerBundle. A bundle that would be responsible for creating and maintaining parterns in the application. A partner could be a lot more than a customer. It could also be a supplier, a company or a shop employee. The idea is, that the PartnerBundle could even be used in a CRM application.
We now are a few months further, and Vespolina is going steady. Unfortunately, I have little time to spare, so I can’t work on Vespolina as much as I like. At the company we haven’t made a decision about the platform, so I can’t spend time on Vespolina there.
I hope to create some time in the coming weeks. Really need to get going on the forms.