PHP 5 Zend Certified Engineer is the most known and respected title for PHP developers. Currently, at the end of 2009, there are only 3493 Zend Certified Engineers worldwide. 2542 of them are certified in PHP 5.

Surprisingly it isn’t  really hard to pass the exam. With proper approach and materials it is even quite easy.

Let me share with you a  few tips which will let you pass the exam so you could also be listed on PHP Yellow Pages.

When you are working with social media you tend to forget that the adoption of social media is still rather low. I recently noticed this when I was requested to provide a presentation about online corporate branding. Still many people are hardly using the possibilities of social media. Meanwhile, it’s becoming obvious that you can improve your competitive advantage. By means of social media the smallest company is able to gain the branding image of a big corporate. Online the differences in between big and small are way smaller than in the offline world. Below I will share with you what social media you could give a try in 2010.

In the software development world employers always look for creative coders. Such employees come up with innovative ideas which may save a lot of time when developing functionalities that are hard to create. They see doors where others see walls. My colleague once said that all best ideas result from coders’ laziness. They use their creativity to make their life simpler. As I mentioned in my previous post, the best coders don’t aim for complexity while missing the obvious solutions. They usually are faithful to simplicity. But this requires creativity.

I believe we all agree that 2009 has been a horrible year for many of us. But not necessarily for all of us. Despite or maybe even thanks to the economic downturn the IT outsourcing market didn’t lose that much, or even gained. To save cost companies started to outsource their software development to low-cost nearshore and offshore locations.

Today the future looks brighter, it looks like the economy will recover, although many things are still uncertain. Whatever happens, for sure it will have a big impact on nearshoring and offshoring. Below I will show you my personal forecast. Please don’t blame me in a year time if my forecast tuns out to be either right or wrong.

zacksays.com

It’s been estimated that almost 50% of newly hired employees fail in their jobs within the first 2 years and the first 3 months are the most crucial for their success. As I discussed in my previous post there are various reasons why newbies fail. Is it only dependent on their own behavior or attitude? Is it only down to the internal reasons? What about the external factors such as the impact of the company they start working for?

Recently I’ve migrated GOYELLO’s Redmine installation to Gentoo Linux. I’ve used nginx as a load balancer and proxy to Mongrel Cluster. Read on to learn more about the installation process of this flexible and scalable setup.

Just imagine yourself being the world famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn. Somebody hired you to prepare a nice painting of his company. Once you show him your almost finished painting, he requests you to remove a person and to move another one. And of course in his opinion this isn’t a big job.

Are you still there? How would you feel? Who’s the artist here? Who can decide whether something is easy or not?

We all know about it but there is always an issue how to explain it to a beginner, why static classes are just a no way to go. Of course, you as a software guru can directly point out at least 10 reasons why… “it is not testable”, “it is not object oriented coding”, “you make your code highly coupled”, and so on… Unfortunately, beginners accept them as “very smart reasons”, but they don’t fully understand them. How to explain why static classes are just pure evil?

Apparently, the only constant thing in this world is change. Also social trends change along with the customs and we need to get used to completely different etiquette rules to survive in the jungle of social media. Like with any other form of communication people get to like us or we simply annoy them.

When using social networks we may also offend people and put them off for not following some basic rules of polite behavior. Below I’m presenting the list of practical tips on how to use Twitter in a way that we avoid irritating our potential valuable followers. I hope this list will make things easier for all of us.

Last week Dell announced they earned over $6.5 million through Twitter alone. This message gained a lot of (social) media attention. But I doubt the credits of the success should go to Twitter alone. Dell is putting a lot of effort in social media like their blog, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and multiple Twitter accounts. Their social media effort generated this additional turnover not Twitter. Unfortunately till now Dell is the only good example of a successful social media strategy.