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.

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There are many ways PHP applications are deployed on production servers. Some people use SCMs like Subversion to fetch latest revision of code. Others simply transfer the files via FTP, SSH or rsync.

There is one problem with all of these approaches.

They are error prone.

File transfer is only part of the deployment process. If something needs to be configured, built or run afterwards it’s often performed manually.

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.

The value of having jelled teams in the company or working in one is pretty obvious. Such teams are more productive and work more efficiently since they feel comfortable with each other. Can we use some magic trick to create a good team? Not really. For managers it’s usually easier to point out team killing factors rather than give a recipe for a healthy team.

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.

During the first international Symfony Live conference Fabien Potencier introduced Symfony 2. It’s a next generation framework which will change PHP world forever. I already wrote about the highlights of the conference and revealing the Symfony 2 was the most awaited.

It’s only a preview release and first stable version is expected at the end of 2010. Even so the framework already looks very impressive.

Read on to get an overview of all its new and cool features. Symfony finally gets its capital ‘S’!

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.

Recently, I’ve come cross an HBR article “The Innovator’s DNA”, in which they explain what makes some people innovative and what sets them apart from the rest of us? They also tried to answer the question why some companies are innovative and some are not? Where do the best ideas come from? The article is based on the study carried out by the professors from  Harvard, Insead and BrighamYoung University.

After 6 years they identified 5 secrets of being innovative.The findings are optimistic. The researchers say it’s not an inherent feature but it’s a set of skills that can be learned. According to the article, creativity is close to 80 percent learned and acquired. This means there is hope for almost everybody!

Lime is a testing tool bundled with symfony. It can be, however, used separately with any PHP application.

It is a great alternative for famous PHPUnit. Its advantage is simplicity. Since writing tests with lime is dead easy it’s a perfect choice for unit testing newbies.

The company life is all about communication be it direct, face-to-face or virtual and remote with colleagues, clients and company partners. Have you ever counted how many meetings you attend in the period of a month or a year? Many people’s work days consist of meetings almost entirely. After all these hours of discussing most of them say “Now I can get back to work and finally focus on my job”.

Do they not treat meetings like part of their work then? What does this sentence imply? Do they indirectly send the message that the time spent in a meeting was simply counter-productive?