Conferences and events

This page is a reference to the conferences I have attended. It was inspired by Juozas's example.

Here's where I have been. You may have met me there:

• phpDay 2010, Alba Adriatica as a speaker with Architettura e testabilità.
• PHP Barcelona 2010 with Architecture and testability.
• TEDx Lake Como 2010 as an attendee.
• WebTech Italia 2010 as an attendee.
• Italian Agile Day 2010 as an attendee.
• phpDay 2011 with Pursuing Domain-Driven Design practices in PHP and An year of Pomodoros.
• Dutch PHP Conference 2011 with Pursuing Domain-Driven Design practices in PHP and the 3-hour workshop Testing in isolation.
• PHP Barcelona 2011 with An year of Pomodoros.
• Domain-Driven Design Day with DDD in PHP.
• Global day of code retreat 2011, Milan, as an attendee.
• PHP Goes Mobile with Scrivere test in PHP che utilizzano il browser Android. 
• PHP.TO.START 2012 with a talk on testability.
• phpDay 2012 with What they didn't tell you about object-oriented programming in PHP.
• Global day of code retreat 2012, Milan edition, as a coach.
• PHP Benelux 2013 with The Pomodoro Technique.
• PHP.TO.START 2013 with Accepting a legacy.
• phpDay 2013 with The test suite is slow.
• Legacy code retreat Milan 2013 as a coach.
• Italian Agile Days 2013 with Test sulle immagini and as a coach in the Code Retreat.
• Global day of code retreat Milan 2013 as a coach.
• Mobile World Congress 2014 as an attendee.
• phpDay 2014 with How to test 2 years of behavior for 16 countries in 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
• Vim Brulé as a Vim padawan.
• PHPCon Poland 2014 with Distributing PHP applications over HTTP.
• Codemotion 2014 where I helped Jacopo Romei in his workshop. 
• phpDay 2015 as an attendee.
• Italian Agile Day 2015 with Property-based testing: Extending examples to a specification
• Global day of code retreat Milan 2015 as a coach. 
• /dev/winter 2016 as an attendee. 
• Agile in the City 2016 with How to test years of behavior for N countries in 18 minutes.
• Dutch PHP Conference 2016 with CQRS and Domain Events for integration.
• Pipeline Conf 2017 as an attendee. 
• phpDay 2017 with Long-running PHP processes.
• PHP South Coast 2017 with Long-running PHP processes.
• Dutch PHP Conference 2017 with Long-running PHP processes. 
• Agile Cambridge 2017 with Cheap and reproducible testing environments on AWS.
  
• Container Camp UK 2017 as an attendee.
• Pipeline Conf 2018 as an attendee. 
• Agile Cambridge 2022 with From soloists to ensemble.
  

Grouply and connect with me

I have been receiving several emails with contact requests on Grouply.
I registered there, but Grouply required then my Yahoo! username and password to work, which I'll never enter on a 3rd party application (it's a very evil and dangerous habit.) If only they used OAuth or OpenID... (is the latter dead?)

I actually do not follow many mailing lists in this period, apart from zf-contributor. So if you want to connect with me, I'm on Twitter, and you will be sure that I read tweet where I am mentioned every day.
I do not use Facebook instead - except for people that I have already met out of the Internet (conferences, work, university). This blog and Twitter are really the best ways to chat for me.

The Flattr model

Following examples from Germany, I have integrated the Flattr buttons in this blog. I also reduced the only ad, an AdSense banner, to a small box on the right.

Basically Flattr is a micropayment system:

• Users charge their account via Paypal or other means.
• They flattr really amazing blog entries or useful articles they found on the Internet, when they want to repay the authors for their time and effort.
• At the end of every month a small, configurable amount of money (like 2 or 10 €) is set aside. This is divided between all the flattered articles the user has selected.

Fixed expense, almost no barrier to micropayment once registered to Flattr (Paypal has fees that render donating something like € 0.10 impossible). We'll see how this work out.
If you also want to be flattered, try set up the system on your blog too.

Merry Christmas

Saying it with John Lennon, merry Christmas and a happy new year to all the Invisible to the eye readers!

Now on Facebook

I created an handy Facebook page for people who want to follow Invisible to the eye via this great social network. All new posts will be also referenced on its Wall to provide prompt notifications for you.

Invisible to the eye on Facebook

How to not waste time surfing blogs: introduction to feeds

Have you ever returned to a blog every day or hour to see if the author has written some new, great post? What if the blog you follow are more than an hundred? When too much components are involved, the Publish/Subscribe pattern comes helping, to decouple the subscribers (readers) from following every publisher (blogs) and conserve some productivity instead of surfing an hundred blogs to seek updates.

Publishing
When a website has to syndicate a list of items which is frequently updated, it can place an xml document conforming to certain standards where these items are kept (usually only the last ones published, and with a shortened description in place of the content to keep the document lean). The typical formats used are Atom and Rss, and since the main feed aggregators supports both they are somewhat equivalent.
The list of items can be everything: Invisible to the eye, this blog, publishes a feed for the new posts and for the comments; Wikipedia publishes the list of changes to a page; Twitter the list of an user updates.
Feeds are normally generated by a server-side script, in my case the same that manages blog posts; it can derive feed fields (title, text, url) from the posts table in the database. When a feed is in place, the tedious process of open the main page to check if new articles have been published is standardized and can be automatically done by a program or a web application for us.
The last step is to take advantage of autodiscovery: placing a special link tag in the head section of html documents can link to a xml feed which will be displayed by browsers as available for subscribing. In Firefox, for instance, a small icon appears in the location bar where a feed exists as an alternate version of a page content.

Subscribing
On the other side, feed aggregators manage a list of feeds you subscribed to. When you discover a feed, you can put the url in a program or web application that will check periodically, every few hours, the feed for you.
Every time the aggregator gathers data from feeds, it lists the new items that you have not already read and organizes them as you like. When you want to check your list of 100 preferred blogs for new content, the only action needed on your side is to open Google Reader and see the list of new articles. Every post has a globally unique url which act as a primary key.
I prefer web application for aggregating data since they mantain the list of current unread items in every machine where I'm viewing them. Ideally, they can also do only one ping for every feed even if thousands of users are subscribed: they are the Blackboard of this pattern.
In a real publish/subscribe system the websites should notify the aggregator of new items, but the http technology is limited and the inverse process happens to emulate a push style. However, some extension to this mechanism is in development.

Wrapping and mashups
Once a standardized way to let content flow such as xml feeds has been developed, new ideas come up and xml is a pillar of web 2.0:

• FeedBurner is a wrapping service that envelopes a feed giving you a nice, short url: then you can link in your pages the FeedBurner version and gain automatic statistics and optional reformatting, and also embellishment of the syndicated data when viewed in-browser (with links and buttons to pass the feed to the most famous web based aggregators).
  
• A mashup is an application that combines external sources of content and provides a unique view of them. For instance if you are a fan of php, you can subscribe to a feed of a php mashup which publishes the best php articles it finds scanning thousands of feeds around the web, filtering out the bad choices.
  

Now you have a general view of how xml feeds works. I hope you will join the web feed of this blog if you want to remain informed of brand new articles.
And if you do not have a feed aggregator yet, check out Google Reader.

About this blog

This blog is A journey in web development, (computer) science and engineering: getting to know what lies under the hood.

My name is Giorgio Sironi and I am Computer Engineer working as a software developer. Currently I work in Onebip in Milan, in Italy. My main interestes are currently architecture, testability, distributed systems.

I firmly believe that software development is an engineering task, and that an engineer should know not only to use tools but also how tools are built. This blog is a voyage in learning how things work - particularly web technologies; it is also a dissertation on how to build something that lasts.

My hope is to share what I find along the way in this journey, and I commit to provide value for the web community, with articles and post series on the practices and techniques that I use in my work and projects.

To contact me for any reason, feel free to write an e-mail to info @ giorgiosironi dot (no spam please) com.