PHP TestFest 2008 and Atlanta PHP

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:03 UTC

Yesterday, php.net announced TestFest 2008!

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

Atlanta PHP will be taking part in TestFest 2008! As a preview for our May 1st meeting, we will have a workshop format catering to two different groups of developers. For beginning PHP developers, we will help you get started developing PHP applications by helping to set up your environment and teaching a few of the basics. For intermediate-to-advanced developers, we will discuss how you can assist the PHP development community by writing phpt tests. More details to come in the future.

Tell your PHP user group organizer about TestFest 2008 and get your members started writing PHP tests today!

2 Comments »  Permalink  Tags: atlanta, atlantaphp, php, php-qa, phpt, qa, testfest2008

Making Money With PHP and Google’s Summer of Code

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 1:10 UTC

Are you a student or do you know of a student who wants to make money this summer flipping bits instead of burgers? Furthermore, does said student want to make money programming for the PHP project? If so, then the Google Summer of Code and the PHP project provides just the opportunity.

I’m posting this for two reasons: 1) as a favor to Elizabeth Smith and 2) because I’d really like to see some interesting projects go to benefit the PHP community. In the past, the Google SoC has had some interesting PHP projects (2006, 2007), and this year is no different with a slew of potential projects, some of which I find very interesting.

For the math aficionados, there’s an idea for algorithmic optimizations in the language. For Unicode lovers, there’s the suggestion to continue the work to update every function in php-src, giving full native Unicode support to PHP 6. For those who like working with XML, there’s work to be done on PhD, the PHP-based DocBook renderer. OOP buffs will enjoy building support for anonymous functions, delegates, return type hinting, and property type hinting into the language. The list goes on.

And, if none of these interest you, you’re welcome to submit your own project idea. If you want an idea from me that’s not listed on the wiki, perhaps you’d be interested in doing some C# development to implement PHP on Microsoft’s DLR (more info on the DLR).

So, there’s money to be made and cool projects to work on. Plus, it’ll look good on your resume.

The only problem is the deadline. It’s March 31st! So, submit your proposal today!

No Comments  Permalink  Tags: google, gsoc, php