Announcing a new Meetup for PHPDetroit - The Detroit Area PHP Developers Network!

What: PHPDetroit - Detroit Area PHP Developers Network February Meetup

When: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:00 AM

Where:
Caribou Coffee
1413 West 14 Mile Road
Madison Heights, MI 48071
(248) 585-9163

Folks, my apologies for the extended down time. Lets get some ideas for this meeting!

Learn more here:
http://meetup.phpdetr...

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Agenda:
Since this group consists primarily of new members, I've structured the agenda around some of our past topics of discussion. This meeting is more of a meet-n-greet to get a better idea of the direction the group should take.

Introductions
-Experience with PHP
-Site's visited regularly
-Time using PHP

IDE's - What do you use when writing PHP code?

As a PHP developer, how are you making money from PHP?

Clients, Dealing with Feature Creep
-Project Scoping
-Client documentation

Testing
-Why test
-Testing tools
-Unit Tests, PHPUnit
-Selenium
-iMacro (FireFox Plugin)
-Testing Environments
-Localhost
-Cloud Server Usage (Utlity)

Building vs Buying
-When to build it, when to buy it?

For the more experienced PHP developers, it would be great to have you speak on specific topics for future meetings.

I have been teaching a beginners class and it reminded me of some of the smaller things that we tend to forget. I think one of the discussions we could touch on is efficiency. (Or feel free to wait for a meeting when I can attend and defend my position :) )

I have met very few developer who don't have the philosophy of "The Servers are fast, why worry about it". This attitude overall disgusts me. I would really like to promote PHP as a language that will allow us to write web based software, and in that instance, every CPU Tick counts.

Efficiency questions,

Why is the SWITCH faster than IF, when it can be used instead?

Why is a for loop faster than a for each?

How do you weigh efficiency over ease of use for custom functions vs. procedural code?

I think this would be a great discussion to have.

Marco

I think this is an excellent topic for discussion as many PHP developers seek functionality without thinking about the impact.

This is something I deal with on a daily basis when working with prospects. Look at the business side it: an application that is efficient translates to a lower total cost of operation. Consider the cost savings: If your application can run on a $10/Mo shared hosting account or cloud server instead of a $300/month dedicated server, you just increased the value of your product (and your service) by being able save your client nearly $3500 a year. On a large scale project, this can translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings or more annually. This can be easily be THE difference between your product/service and the other guys.

Bing