I just got a note from Dhwani Vahia that I passed the Zend certification exam for PHP 5. Woohoo! 🙂

Many thanks to the folks at PHP Architect for making the test available free of charge at php|works. That’s twice now I’ve been able to take it on their dime (although the test in Cancun last May was a lot more fun, for obvious reasons ;-).

I had the good luck to share a cab back to the airport with Wez Furlong after php|works. Wez had presented a new talk about how to work with email properly (jokingly subtitled “Not PDO” by everyone there), and was curious to know how it was received. I replied that I liked it, but struggled for a moment on “why” … and then it hit me: the reason I liked it was that it was about a fundamental operation that still seems to trip developers up regularly.

Although I told Cal Evans when he interviewed me that the next technology I’m really interested in is AJAX (particularly its implementation in Protaculous), I’m not as excited by it as everyone else seems to be. I think it’s neat, but good grief, if wide swaths of developers can’t do input filtering properly, what good can adding AJAX do? Get the basics right first, then you can do progressive enhancement as you go.

The slides from my php|works talk are now available as a PDF file. I’m going to try to create an audio version after I get back from the conference.

I’ve noted before that I’ll be presenting at php|works in a couple of days; it’s in the 4-5pm slot on Wednesday (13 Sep). The synopsis is public, but I wanted to give a little teaser about the presentation, in hopes of drumming up greater attendance. The talk is titled “Organizing Your PHP Projects”, and the subtitle is “Project Planning in One Lesson.”

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