After the last blog post weird stuff started happening. For the first time in my life, I had companies asking me to work for them, instead of me looking for positions and applying to those. While I did also approach a couple companies myself, those that approached me were favored a bit more. Roughly a month after the first post, I had a shortlist of 7 positions which were all awesome enough to work for. So then the elimination process began, as I have not yet figured out how to clone myself. After a lot of difficult choices, and the realization that I’m not signing for life, I finally came up with a number 1. Quickly thereafter, I received an offer that worked for me, which is now signed by both parties.

With a little pride, I’m happy to announce that as of Tuesday May 31st, I will be working for Barracuda Networks, specifically for their Labs department. As a lead web developer, I will be working on projects like www.barracudalabs.com, www.profileprotector.com, www.tweetgrade.com, www.tweetbrawl.com, www.purewiretrust.com and others. With a mix of some nerves and a lot more excitement, I’m looking forward to next Tuesday.

With the decision came also the consequence that I had to disappoint the other 6, which was quite hard, as they were very appealing too. However, with permission and in coordination with these companies, I can share a couple of these positions, so they can hopefully find someone as well.

First of all: Enrise, an onsite position in Amersfoort for an experienced PHP webnerd. This is a very awesome company (ask @skoop if you don’t take my word for it) and came in as a very close second. If you fit the description, and can do the commute, you should definitely pay them a visit.

Next: Oracle, specifically the MySQL team, is looking for several support engineers. If you love to talk and help out people as their last resort, this could be an awesome position for you. They are looking for multiple people across the whole world, and are very eager to talk to you if you know your way around MySQL.

Finally, one that came in after I had already signed with Barracuda, so I did not give them a thorough review, but the guy that approached me seemed a very pleasant person to work for. Nimbuzz is looking for a DBA and PHP coders, all onsite in Rotterdam. Contact them through the site for more info.

For all of these go: If I know you properly, feel free to find me, and I’ll give you an introduction.

Now that the search is over, and I’m about to start the new position, I’d like to thank everyone that kept an eye out for me, or somehow propagated the news that I was looking. Specifically I want to thank Cal Evans, for all the support he has given in this transition. Thanks buddy, you rock!

~RW

The content above was originally published as And the next employer is… under a CC-BY license.

As most of you probably know, I’ve been working for Zend Technologies since medio 2007 (first DevZone, then eBiz team). But to all things comes an end, and I have signed the “Termination agreement” that Zend handed me, which means I will no longer be working for Zend as of May 2nd, 2011. This also means I’m open for new opportunities.

The opportunity at Zend was my shot at playing with the big boys. There have been fun times, frustrating times, moments I will cherish forever and moments I have already forgotten. I have learned, a lot, but most importantly got to meet and work with amazing people, some of which I now consider good friends. But besides the good things, there have also been challenges, which have been ultimately the reason why Zend and I are parting ways. Ever since Matthew and Daniel left the team, there has been not much “team chemistry” between me and any of the developers of the team. I’m not sure if this is due to the cultural differences (all remaining developers were Israeli) or personal differences. Of course, the distance (they work locally in the office, I work from home, on a different continent, some 500 miles away) didn’t help in that either. Then communication becomes crucial, and if neither party is fully proficient in a common language, then there you have your challenge. The chemistry was there between my manager and me, but after he moved on to a job description that did not include managing the team I was in, the challenge became an issue.

Besides that, the job description itself gave me less and less of a challenge, ever since the initial (huge) project was completed and implemented. Over the years, tasks became to appear dull, and felt pointless and repetitive. It felt like “holding the fort” instead of accomplishing something or even making progress. Both Zend and I have attempted several things to resolve this, but no real change was accomplished in this. I can only conclude the description and me weren’t a good match, and at some point you just got to realize it doesn’t work out. I have thought about quitting a lot of times, but the awesome people and a feeling of betrayal to them when I would leave kept me at Zend. Now that Zend also can’t justify the costs anymore, it’s time to move on.

Credits

Now that the moment of leaving is defined, I can only feel thankful to dozens of people, who made my life and work fun, worth waking up for and going the extra mile when it was needed. I’d like to name a few by name, who caused an even bigger impact than the already-awesome “average” Zender: Thank you:

• Boaz Ziniman, for trying everything in your capabilities to keep me happy
• Cal Evans, for giving me a chance, and being such an awesome friend and mentor
• Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Daniel Berstein for being such an awesome friend, mentor and teammate
• Nili Gafni, Revital Hasenfratz, Shiry Benshar, Moira Cabrisy, Beth Gomez, Debbie Ottersteter, Avigail Ofer and Katja Reck, for giving me such good times and fun that everything else was worth it. If I could choose to work with you again, I’d sign without hesitation.

I could probably list every Zender here, had I worked with them more closely. I don’t know how they do it, but I don’t have hard feelings against anyone there.

The future…

And with that said, I’d like to make public that I’m now actively looking for new opportunities. I will not start freelancing (yet); while the frequent change in projects and the customer interactions sounds attractive, for now I still want the certainty of a long-term (6mo or longer) contract with a single employer. I am open for both on-site (Netherlands/The Hague,Utrecht,Rotterdam area) and remote positions, and even relocating is an option albeit that I’d like to find out first that the “relation” works, before the world gets turned upside down.

My talents lie in finding creative solutions that solve problems for customers, and I get the most satisfaction out of implementing solutions that save them time and/or make their lives easier. At Zend, the most fun projects were where through casual conversation or “watching customers work” I identified kinks in human/process interaction and was able to suggest and implement improvements, often trivial, that freed up customers (internal) to use their talents to the full extend instead of wasting it on no-brain-required tasks or going out of their way to conform to “the system”. My ability to see things from a customer POV together with quick learning usually get me the compliment of being fast, and the thanks I get for improving something people didn’t even identify as an issue is so incredibly rewarding. My whole life I have worked with customers in some way or another, be it in retail sales (shop manager), 3rd line technical support or development, and I can’t imagine a job where I wouldn’t interact with customers, internal or external. I guess I’m not so much a real developer, but more a solutions provider, and code is just a tool to make people’s lives better. Apparently I’m pretty good at that, judging by these quotes of previous managers:

“As a matter of fact, I’ve got to be pretty insane to have handed you off to Boaz, you are the best contractor I’ve had.” – Cal Evans, Resume review 2007

“You are the most passionate developer I have worked with” – Boaz Ziniman, performance review 2010

But I can only be good and productive in a good environment, so I am looking for a company/team that can define itself with keywords as “social” and “friendly spirit”. Communication is crucial to me, without “watercoolers” (virtual or not) I end up in a vegetative state. A high salary or a raise is fun for a week, but friends and social interaction (virtual or not) keep me happy on a day-to-day basis. Besides that, I need a target in my job description. Stuff like deadlines, roadmaps, goals, etc. A job description that can be summarized as “water-threading” isn’t suited for me; I get certainty and security out of being able to measure myself against defined expectations.

Should you have any questions, or maybe even have or know of a suited opening, feel free to shoot me an email at remi(a)wolerized.com (UPDATE: I’ve signed with Barracuda Networks). In case you’re a “headhunter/recruiter”: If you can only refer to the company as “a client”: don’t even bother, I won’t reply to your emails.

Thanks again to everyone, Zender or not, for making this time worthwhile. It’s not the blogpost I had in mind after this silence, and it’s a lot longer than expected, but I do wish you all the best in your current position and any future endeavors. I hope we stay in touch, and maybe our paths will cross again in the future. I feel blessed for your companionship, and I hope to update you soon with where I will be working next.

~RW

The content above was originally published as Goodbye Zend under a CC-BY license.

I don’t like pyramid schemes, but if both Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Ivo Jansch are participating, who am I to stop the trail? So here’s my list of seven(ish) things you may or may not know about me (likely the latter), after receiving a tag from Ivo Jansch, who in turn got tagged by Matthew Weier O’Phinney, who got tagged by Keith Casey, who got tagged by Tony Bibbs, the root of all evil the one who started this all.

• Although both shops and calendars tend to try to tell you when christmas season begins, my christmas season starts as soon as I see the Coca Cola Christmas Truck commercial on TV. In the netherlands, they usually start airing after December 5th (Sinterklaas presents eve). But the moment I actually see it, is completely unpredictable. For some reason, even unknown to me, I don’t get the ‘Christmas feeling’ till I see that commercial. That commercial always creates the spirit for me, no matter when or where I see it. I just can’t decorate my house or make christmas plans till I’ve seen that commercial. And I never get tired of seeing it, even if they air it after christmas. I really have no idea why it does to me what it does. Maybe in some hidden away part of my brain it connects it to the best christmas I ever had so far, 13 years ago, which was at a family where I also saw TV for the first time in my life (my mom is conservative christian, so we didn’t have a tv). However, thanks to Graham Christensen, I now have the christmas spirit all year long, as I’m now the proud owner of three original Coca Cola Christmas Truck Limited Edition Collectibles (the ’98 Holiday Caravan Truck, the ’00 Holiday Gold Caravan Truck and the ’06 75 year Anniversary Truck)
• Since I don’t live in the States, I don’t have a real connection with any NFL team. Yet, I like the sport a lot, and watch a lot of games. I pick the team to cheer for, based on the colors of their outfit. 8 out of 10 times, this is a winning pick (feel free to contact me for my pick, dr. Lou), even though I have no idea who plays in the game, or what happened in all the time before the game starts. Over all, my favorite team has been New Orleans. Gold and black, with an added fleur-de-lis (which also used to be the symbol for the Sea Scouts when I was a sea scout during my teenage years) is the most good-looking combination, I believe. Unfortunately, the Saints are also most often the reason of a losing pick.
• My first development was on a VTech Precomputer (looks somewhat like this one), a toy ‘computer’, at the age of 10. Besides having calculus and grammar games (aimed at elementary school students), it had a simple BASIC interpreter. With only 2 lines of 26 characters, I learned VTech Basic on it, and made my very first ‘programs’ (well, it executed :P). Shortly thereafter, I got an old MSX-2 from my 6th grade elementary school teacher (age 11), on which I learned a lot more. At age 13, I got an old 80386SX, followed by a 80486DX2 and my first own purchase, an AMD Athlon 1000MHz. After a lot of QuickBasic development, this opened the way to Visual Basic. I started web development in ASP VBScript , coming from VB this made a lot of sense. I’ve programmed ASP for 2~3 years, until I figured out that the fact that we weren’t running on an IIS host in production (external hosting) hurt development. Since the server was running on LAMP with a component to emulate ASP, and I heared about this thing called PHP, I decided to give it a try. Ported all ASP applications to PHP with a script called asp2php (which actually worked quite good for us) in a day, and started maintaining it. I’ve never looked back at ASP, kept going in PHP, and became a Zend Certified Engineer a bit over a year ago, although my original life plan specifically said ‘MCSE’.
• My first employer was an american, who just came back to The Netherlands, and opened a computer store. Besides quite some computer techniques (like hot flashing a BIOS), he taught me what is important in life, and in business. Even though the job ended after 18 months, this guy is still a MVP in my life, and I still regret never being able to tell him what he mean[t/s] to me.
• I managed a small computer store at the age of 22 for a period of 9 months. I was supposed to just work there as a technician, but realized within a week that the place was going bankrupt. The owner agreed that it couldn’t hurt if I tried to get it back on track, and I liked the challenge. After having the place profitable again, and made it able to get a positive balance in another year, the owner broke in to the store (his own), emptied the safe, and fled out of the country. At that point, I locked the door, and walked away. Although this period wasn’t very profitable for myself, I do value what lessons I learned, and I’m still amazed at what one can achieve if there’s a strong will.
• I got my current job due to people I have/had never met in real life, nor did they ever meet me. I found a dream company where i wanted to work, I didn’t believe my C.V. was convincing enough to show that I was worth considering, so decided I needed to get a ZCE certificate first. While ordering the exam voucher, I had some issues with the online shop, but managed to order after all, and I passed the exam. While waiting for the certificate to arrive, and prepping for the job interview, Ligaya made Cal Evans aware of the troubles. He got in touch with me, and over-compensated for the troubles in an excellent way. During some small talk, I explained to him why I wanted to get myself certified, and he asked me to keep him posted on the interview. After being rejected at the interview, I told Cal, and he offered me to work as a moonlighter on some DevZone stuff. Apparently, my work impressed him so much, that he told a lot of people about me, which resulted in a FTE contract with Zend (on the eBiz team, as independent contractor). Although I met Cal Evans in real life 8 months later, I still have to meet Ligaya in real life, but I do owe them both big time, as this is the best job I have had in my life. The name of the dream company is intentionally left out, as it turned out later that something didn’t happen as it was supposed to, and I currently have a friendly relationship with the company, and a lot of its employees.
• I thought a long time about the next one, as it does reveal quite a bit of my past. Then again, I don’t see any reason for people not knowing it, and it simply is a part of who I am, nothing to be ashamed off. So, I merged the desktop-development and web-development history, to not exceed the 7, so here it is as a bonus: The name most people know me as, Remi Woler, is not my official name. At age 17, while being ‘running away’ from a so-called ‘family replacing care home’ (a normal house where professionals provide a home for small groups of people who can’t live at their own family for whatever reason, in my case: my mom couldn’t handle the stress of 4 kids in puberty on her own), I was thinking about an alias I should adopt for my online life. I had read several books about cyberspace, and it was explained clearly in those books that you had to have an alias, so nobody could ever connect the dots to your real life. Of course, that was mostly for hackers and phreakers, but if everybody was doing it, I needed one too. Since I felt really abandoned at that time, one of the reasons for running away in the first place, the link to Remi (one of the main characters in Hector Mallot’s novel ‘Sans Famille’) was easy. The second part was more difficult. After some thought and pondering, I decided on one of the cool things I was exploring in Physics (the school subject), which was the way electricity works: taking the path of least resistance. Since in dutch ‘way’ is a more common way of saying it instead of ‘path’, it became Way Of LEast Resistance. Shortly thereafter, I made my first steps on IRC, need a nickname, remembered it, and haven’t stopped using it ever since. The feelings changed, but this is what it originally stands for, and how it got it’s meaning. Today, it’s just a more english-friendly alternative for my official name, as those native english speakers really have issues with those hard G’s and R’s (I have 5 of those in my official name :P).

The people I tag (in no particular order):

• Nili Gafni – My favorite distraction when at work, you can distract me any time
• Juliette Reinders, aka JRF_NL – For all the work she does for PHPWomen in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the endless energy she seems to have (couldn’t find a blog, so no link)
• Dolf Schimmel, aka Freeaqingme – For being around at the odd hours when I’m still cracking at things, and often approaching issues from the most unexpected angle
• Jeff Jones, aka Tetraboy – For being my saviour in my domain management, and still being a friend, even though I ask so much of him
• Henk, my younger brother – For being a best friend and just being you whenever I rant about something again
• Mark van der Velden aka Dynom – For thinking he could get away with it by just going offline for a couple of days
• Rein Velt- For the endless effort you have done, and are continuing to do, to give the dutch PHP usergroup at least some kind of guidance. Without you, prolly nothing would have happened.

That’s only 6, everyone I can think of apparently has already been tagged. I’ll update if I think of someone else(update: found the 7th).Here are the rules for my fellow bloggers, to keep this alive:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

The content above was originally published as Seven Things – Tagged By Ivo under a CC-BY license.

People have tried for almost a year to get me on twitter. Until now, I have always declined the invitations, and ignored the pleads. But now, things have changed. For a side project, I need to be very up to date with what goes on in the PHP world, and not be the last to know. Since it’s quite obvious that you have to be on Twitter to know about things happening as they happen, I did the unevitable, and signed up for an account. It’ll last for at least a month, and maybe, yes, maybe I might keep it after that, if it turned out to be really helpful, and I can’t live without anymore. We’ll see :). Either way, for the mean time: if you want to follow me, or see the rare update I give, follow me on Twitter!

The content above was originally published as Hello twitterverse! under a CC-BY license.

Only a mere 24h, and the world will know where the Americans want to go next. Like to know where the world wants the America to go? Cast your vote on iftheworldcouldvote.com and find out how the world, and your country, thinks about the future.

~RW

The content above was originally published as If the world could vote… under a CC-BY license.

A couple of weeks ago, the PHP Enterprise Management Magazine Newsletter approached me with a request to do an interview with me for their section ‘Developers World’. My first PHP related interview, and I’m actually quite fond of how it turned out. If you want to know a bit more about me, you can read the whole interview here. If any questions arise, please leave a comment. If you want an answer, but do not want your comment displayed, feel free to mention that, and the manual moderation will make sure your comment won’t be published.

~RW

The content above was originally published as Full frontal under a CC-BY license.

A search engine excels or fails with the results it returns. It’s not the number of results that count, but the result the user was looking for. If a user can’t find what the user is looking for, even though the user knows it’s there (just not where), the search engine will get the blame. Even if the user used to most irrelevant keywords for the search, it’s always the search engines fault. Google became famous with this. It found what you were looking for. You didn’t need a degree in computer science, it just found what you were looking for. Lately, it looks like it’s trying the opposite.

At first, Google rocked. Whatever you threw at it, you never had to browse past page 5 to find what you were looking for. If you had to, your keywords were wrong. Then, Google added a typo-corrector. This feature suggested an alternative word that had more results than a word you used as a keyword. While this helped to fix an occasional typo quickly, it was mostly useless. More often than not, it would suggest a completely other keyword, that had nothing to do with your search, but shared some letters with one of your keywords. Since it was only a link at the top and bottom of the page, this was easy to ignore.

Then someone at Google had one the worst ideas ever. He or she decided to ‘assist’ the user, and already return results with the corrected word added. So instead of returning the results for ‘weater’, it would return the results for ‘weater OR weather’. Helpful, right? Cause you are a user, you are stupid, so we help you, wether you want it or not, and we decide what you are searching for. Sounds really helpful, doesn’t it? But what if the user really wanted to search for ‘weater’? After all, it is a real thing, albeit slang (hint: to save you from browsing to page 6 of the Google results, it’s an abbreviation for a ‘wife beater’ (an A-Shirt(US), singlet(AU), or vest(UK))). The user isn’t completely out of luck yet, as an undocumented feature will be added. If the user surrounds the keyword with double quotes, we’ll disable our automated-user-correcting system.

Luckily, there was another someone at Google who wanted to top that. You think you’ve seen worst? Think again! Let’s keep some of the ridiculous automated-user-correcting systems, but let’s make it even worse. We disable the functionality of using double quotes, and we create common-user-error lists, that has a lot of words in it, and we will show results for all of the words in those lists. So, a search for ‘consts flags’ will return one result with the actual word ‘consts’ in it, for the frontpage. For the other results, we’ll use words from the lists instead. So instead of boring development articles, we’ll give a result about what the Sudanese Defense costs, on a site that has Flags in it’s title keywords, the #1 rank. The user is stupid, right? We decide what the user will want to see! Wether it be ‘costs’, ‘constants’, ‘constant’, or ‘const’, we’ll definitely make the 3,070,000 results. The Sudanese Defense is definitely relevant! Just to leave the user not completely in the dark, we will implement the quote trick differently than it used to work. Now, it only works if the user has more than one keyword. If there is only one keyword, we’ll simply ignore it.

I’m not sure wether Google is actually trying to get rid of it’s user-base fast, or if it actually thinks that automatically correcting a user is helpful, but it sure got rid of me. If it won’t take my keywords and just search for those, why should I bother using it? The hunt for a new default search engine is open again. A little princess told me Y! is good, let’s try that out.

~RW

The content above was originally published as Dear Google, I am not retarded! under a CC-BY license.

Today the PHP site announced the results of the QA TestFest in a wrap up article on the php.net site. First of all, I must admit that I was extremely disapointed with the amount of people that participated. Only 30?!? Of the huge world-wide community?!? That can’t be justified… Either way, it appears that the dutch PHP usergroup team has done their job quite well. One of the participants (felixdv) turned out to be the top submitter of the whole TestFest. Now that’s something to be proud off, and I’d like to congratulate him via this way. Besides that title, there was also a raffle to give out ten elePHPants. Four of the ten stuffed animals were awarded to participants of the dutch PHP usergroup! So also a congratulations to Skoop, DragonBE, Rein V, and Marc V. with their family extension! I believe those guys deserved it most, as they went through all the trouble of organizing everything and giving all participants a great day (wrap up of my experience of the dutch PHP usergroup TestFest ’08 event). I’m looking forward to the TestFest next year, and I really hope the turn up will see a growth as exponential as the PHP community’s growth. If you can’t wait till next year, and want to know more about it right now, please read everything you want to know about the TestFest and how you can be part of the solution on the PHP QA TestFest site.

~RW

The content above was originally published as Dutch PHP usergroups wins 4 Elephpants and the top-committer title in PHP TestFest under a CC-BY license.

For a specific reason, I needed two photo’s taken, and I needed them on a very short notice. So, as usual, I call a guy who usually takes pictures for me if I need them, and set up an appointment to have them taken. Before the appointment was due, it was already very clear that he was going to bail on me, and later on, it proved to be true. So I had to find something else. Since I didn’t knew anybody else with a decent camera, and I had the deadline within 24h, I decided I had to buy one myself. Which immediately raised the biggest question: which…

So I contacted a guy I know in the states, who I knew was a very good photographer, and had a lot of knowledge on the subject with the question “I need a cam, tomorrow, $300 max, has to be decent”. That gave about as many options as Google did. After some narrowing down, and showing him a site of available models in the Netherlands, we narrowed it down to about 40 camera’s, where about 10 of them were actually a bit too pricey, but could be done if there was a really good reason. I went over that list before I contacted him, but couldn’t decide. Sure, I could pick the one with the best specs and the lowest price, but that’s not what counts in photography. Sure, I could read a bunch of reviews on the net to find out what other people think of it, but that still doesn’t cut it.

So this guy came up with a brilliant way of finding a decent camera for me: Flickr. Flickr, an image storage web2.0 app by Yahoo, stores for most of the images also the camera make and model, and indexes that, allowing you to filter on it. Long story short, after looking at end-results for camera’s that fitted the criteria, he managed to find the perfect camera for me. The Fuji FinePix S5800 S800.

~RW
P.S. Thanks Graham, you rock!

The content above was originally published as Shopping for a camera, web 2.0 style under a CC-BY license.

While checking if there was already a new IRL race on UseNet (only 2 more weeks till I have Sport1!), my mouse jumped, just before I made a click. This happens quite often on my Imac, and I know the solution is to buy a mousepad, but I just keep forgetting that. This jump made me click on one of the ads on the side, which happened to be for some webcam site, and of course I was taken straight to there. While being stunned about the amazing high payrate (80 eurocents per minute(!!!)), and wondering if there actually would be people desperate enough to call such a line, something remarkable caught my attention. Although the site clearly says “All models on this site are 18 years or older”, the girls on this page were being advertised as being 17. To the best of my knowledge, that’s illegal in the whole world, except for maybe some Scandinavian(sp?) countries. One of the 2 is a lie. Either they are advertising a wrong age (which is false marketing, you don’t get (to see) what you pay for), or these girls are underage, and it could actually be a crime to watch them on their webcam…

See the (not recommended for work) image by clicking ‘Show’

~RW

NSFW (Not Safe For Work):   Show

The content above was originally published as False marketing? Or illegal underage porn? under a CC-BY license.