Have you ever wondered how many hours do you actually work at the office? Excluding lunch breaks and other breaks obviously. Have you ever calculated your productivity level during the day? How many hours are you able to work uninterrupted? If at all possible.

In my last post about teams I claimed there is no universal recipe for breeding a jelled team. A few days ago I came across a great book Peopleware, first published 20 years ago and then updated a few times. The authors explain what it takes for the team to jell. In order to illustrate the team creation process I would like to tell the story that was told in their book. This is a story of The Black Team-a legend in the computing industry who changed the fate of IBM forever.

Quite some years ago, after attending a presentation about lean production at Toyota, I decided to buy the book “The Toyota Way”. I had the feeling many of their 14 management principles would be applicable to professional services as well. I started reading the book, but never finished. Last weeks I read several posts about lean software development compared to another Agile working method: SCRUM. Honestly, despite the recent car issues that Toyota is facing, I feel both methods, or even a combination of these two, can help us deliver software in a better way.

image credit: symfony-live.com

I’ve just returned from the first international Symfony Live conference in Paris. There are currently a lot of great things happening in the symfony (and Symfony ) world which I’d like to share.

Here are the highlights of what has happened in the symfony world and what we can expect in the near future.

You might think the IT industry is a very clean one from an environmental perspective, but it’s not. In fact the IT industry and the Internet are using such an amount of power that this is becoming a real issue. Data Centers where we store our servers, routers and switches to make our applications accessible are first of all using a lot of power to make all the machines operate and secondly to cool them down. If you want to do something green please support Treehoo!, the new search engine.

Last weekend I had a pleasure to attend the PHP North West Conference in Manchester. Everything started on Friday evening, one day before the actual event, with a pre-conference socializing in the Lass O’ Gowrie pub. I really enjoyed meeting and talking to so many people involved in the PHP community. Everyone, regardless of experience, were very kind and keen to exchange their points of view. Informal meetings with beer, food and video games are really good environment for expanding your social network. I guess it might be even more effective than exchanging views between the conference sessions.

It was already in the late 50s when psychologists discovered that IQ was not enough to guarantee a glittering career in life. The research involved children whose intelligence was first measured and then after 20 years the top performers were found to take a closer look at their lives, both professional and private. To researchers’ astonishment, there was no rule that those who scored highest in their intelligence tests succeeded in their lives as well. The question emerged: what does it take to achieve success in all aspects of life? After some years they came up with an answer: Emotional Intelligence.

For all you social networks fans there’s a new sensation coming to the party. It’s name is Goodreads – the perfect place for people who enjoy reading. The main reason why I got intrigued by it was that I like to keep track of what I am reading, have read, and most importantly, would like to read. Goodreads gives you all that and much more.

During this year’s php|tek conference in Chicago a spontaneous meeting about PHP standards took place. It was organized by a group of people usually working on a couple of important PHP projects like Zend Framework, PEAR, Solar, Agavi, CakePHP, symfony and phing. Unfortunately,  I wasn’t there but the note about the initiative I have found on Left On The Web blog made me really happy.

Design patterns are technology independent but the way of implementation can vary based on the programming language that is used. The book “php|architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns” by Jason Sweat presents some of the design patterns which might be helpful while implementing web applications in PHP 4 and 5. Additionally, it is a good reference to Test Driven Development methodology.