7php.com has posted a new interview with a PHP community member today - this time it's Ivo Jansch (formerly of Ibuildings) now CEO at Eginiq, a mobile development company.

In this edition I talked with Ivo Jansch (@ijansch) ex-CTO of Ibuildings which is one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe. Ivo is known for his involvement in evangelising the use of PHP technology in enterprise environments. He is also the PHP 5.x Certification Advisory Board Member at Zend Technologies. You can read more about Jansch on his blog.

The questions asked include the usual with a few extras thrown in:

• How did you start with PHP?
• To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your advice?
• How do you debug your PHP code, do you use something like xdebug or krumo..etc?
• In the next 5 years, how do you foresee the PHP ecosystem
• If you had to go back in time, would you still choose PHP?

Marco Lopes has posted a wrapup of the PHP North West conference that he recently attended in Manchester. In it he talks about the tutorial sessions he attended the first day as well as the other shorter sessions later in the conference. His is the first summary of several Ibuildings employees that made it to the event.

He covers the content presented by Arne Blankerts (of ThePHP.cc) about general applications security. His session covered security on various levels, not just in the PHP code - hardware, XSS, session hijacking, captchas, database issues and clickjacking. Marco's afternoon was spent at Lorna Mitchell's web services tutorial. Sessions attended on Day 1 included the keynote from Ian Barber, Sebastian Marek and Rowan Merewood.

The Ibuildings techPortal has posted the summary of Day 2 of the Dutch PHP Conference from Marco De Bortoli with some of his experiences from this year's event.

This year as part of the Ibuildings team I attended the Dutch PHP Conference for the first time. What can I say? Well, it was an unbelievable experience; I enjoyed every moment spent there. [...] There was also the high quality of the presented talks, but also for the great opportunity to spend good time with my colleagues at Ibuildings and people from other companies all around the world.

He mentions some talks specifically like Helgi's "First Class APIs", "Managing MySQL" by Thijs Feryn, a look at Modular Architecture from Kore Nordmann and Tobias Schlitt as well as David Zülke's map reduce session.

One thing I really appreciated about DPC was the Open Source and Open Knowledge spirit found there. Speakers were not there just only to talk and present something, they were there more to share their own knowledge and to share ideas and maybe a new solution to their problems. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things I took with me from DPC.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the results of their Ibuildings challenge where the developer had to create a script able to play "Four in a Line" based on an abstract Player class provided.

Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill.

There were three different categories - junior, medium and senior - and one winner for each:

• Junior: Xavier Van Herpe (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Medium: Piotr Mlocek (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Senior: Tomas Creemes (won the iPad)

They also include some observations about the code submitted to the competition including adherence to coding standards and overall performance.

With the recent announcement of the Dutch PHP conference 2011 (and it's call for papers) the Ibuildings crew has taken a look back at DPC 2010 with this new video interview with Lorna Mitchell, the organizer of the 2010 event.

With the Call for Papers open and the for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011, it seems like a good time to bring in this interview from last year's host, Lorna Mitchell. Watch this short video for her impressions of the overall event, and some top tips for getting your talks accepted this year!

The Call for Papers is now open and will last until January 13th. Potential speakers are welcome to submit as many ideas as they'd like for consideration. Travel, hotel and a conference pass will be included for those selected.

The Ibuildings techPortal has officially announced next year's Dutch PHP Conference happening in May - 19th through 21st.

It's that time of year again! For the fifth year in a row, Ibuildings is organising the Dutch PHP Conference, and the new website is back online at http://www.phpconference.nl. The event will be held in Amsterdam from 19th to 21st May 2011. Thursday 19th is tutorial day, and Friday 20th and Saturday 21st are the main conference days. Mark those days in your calendar!

The post also talks about the Call for Papers that's now open and will last until January 13th, 2011. Accepted speakers will have travel costs paid, be given a room during the conference and a pass to the conference. You can submit as many proposals as you'd like so head over to the submissions page and get those ideas in!

Ibuildings has officially wrapped up their "Elephpant Challenge" contest they were holding to solve a routing problem that involved a globe-trotting PHP ElePHPant. Their latest post (from Ivo Jansch) reveals the results.

Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

The shorted route, found using the Haversine Formula, involved stops in Mexico City, Cupertino, Hawaii and the Tower of Pisa. The winner for the Medium category was Andy Thompson with an average of 10 landmarks with 38 lines of code (in 333 seconds). The winner in the Senior category was Michiel Brandenburg with coming out on top with a runtime of 50 seconds in 46 lines of code.

The post also includes some interesting observations they found about the event including contestants' general adherence to the specs, how the choices the developers made really made a difference in the outcome and how difficult running a contest like this could really be. Congrats to the winners!

Those attending the PHP Benelux conference (coming up soon!) will be happy to know that Ibuildings will be sponsoring an evening social event.

The official conference social event is taking place right after the main conference, in the exhibition/lunch room of the conference. We are very grateful for Ibuildings to have stepped up to support us in organizing this conference, and especially also the social event! Thanks to them, everyone will be able to let off some steam when the conference is over. We'll have two hours of free drinks and some snacks for everyone who feels like hanging out.

There will also be a pre-conference social time at DeVagant. You can find out more about the conference here (and here). Unfortunately, the conference has already sold out, so there'll be no more tickets at this time.

Following the stepping down of Cal Evans as the Editor-in-Chief of the IBuildings techPortal website, a new community member has stepped up to take on the role - Lorna Mitchell.

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I'm your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

In her personal post Lorna also mentions other roles she'll be taking on in the IBuildings PHP Centre of Expertise.

The Ibuildings techPortal site has a new post open to European developers to win airfare, hotel and a ticket to the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas (NV).

We love giving stuff away to developers. So we are really happy to be able to announce that our friends at DPC09, Microsoft, and Leaseweb have come together with us to sponsor the first ever European WinPHP Challenge. We want you to build your next Open Source project on IIS7/PHP and win prizes.

The winner of the challenge will be the one that best takes an application (a new one, not a port of a current project) and creates it on a Windows/IIS platform. Entries will be judges on originality, completeness, use of Windows features and documentation. Registration starts April 2nd and the actual contest will start on April 15th. You'll have about a month and a half (until May 31st) to get your application in tip top shape and ready to be judged.

Keep an eye on the wiki and the techPortal for more details as the start of the contest gets closer. Oh, and since its the "European WinPHP Challenge", only PHP programmers in Europe and the UK are eligible.