devexp

You can never get enough interviews, at least if they are a bit interesting…
This time we got an interview with Mr Jean-Baptiste Jung, a very friendly and ambitious guy with little spare time as he mentioned in his interview.

My name is Jean-Baptiste Jung (Pronounce: Young) and I’m a 27 years old blogger, web developer and web designer from the French-speaking part of Belgium.
I started blogging in 2006 by writing a blog in French about the Python programming language. I quickly dropped this blog and created a new one, Lyxia.org to discuss a lot of nice things about the Internet: Web development, Web design, blogging, WordPress and much more. After this successful experience, I decided to create a similar blog, but in English. This is how, in June 2008, I created Cats Who Code.
I’m also an author on several popular blogs as such as WpHacks, ProBlogDesign and Smashing Magazine where I provide various tutorials, how-tos and lists, mostly about WordPress. I have released some WordPress themes as well, the most popular is called OpenBook and the most recent NYC Theme. Apart from blogging, I work as a web developer in a French company and have a lovely wife and a very cute cat.

What projects are you currently working on?
Lots! I’m making big changes to wprecipes.com with a new design and lots of new featur

es. I’m working on CatsWHoCode.com to improve the blog even more. And at last, I’m on the point to publish my first blog which is not about web dev things!

Read more…

Well, well, well after our first interview I guess our ball got rollin’ and we are proud to present our second interview.

This time we got in contact with Jacob Gube who is the founder and maintainer of the Six Revisions weblog having over 35K RSS readers. Let’s hope we reach the same amount one day!!!

Jacob Gube, a web developer and designer who works with PHP, .NET, Flash/ActionScript, XHTML, JavaScript/jQuery/MooTools and MySQL, is the creator and primary author of Six Revisions – a weblog the provides practical, useful information for the modern, standards-compliant web designer and web developer.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working on a PHP/MySQL social news site start-up that’s self-funded. No release dates yet and there’s still a lot of work to be done! Also, I’m trying to finish up a JavaScript book.

Read more…

Those of you who’re developing with symfony under windows will have noticed that, when running tasks in the command prompt, no colors are used. This is because the windows command prompt isn’t compatible with the color notation.
Most of you also have cygwin installed (shame on you if you didn’t :p). But even if you run the tasks through “PuttyCyg”, which is fully compatible with the color notation, you will not benefit from the colors.

Why?

Read more…

A few weeks ago I thought it might be cool to get some interesting guys, which are occupied with projects in PHP, interviewed. And guess what, we got on contact with Mr. Stefan Koopmanschap and he was kind enough to answer all our questions.

Stefan Koopmanschap (‘left’) is a PHP developer, consultant and trainer with an eye for best practices. He works at Unet as (symfony) developer and development team leader. He is a community person and is active in the european PHP community as secretary of the phpBenelux Usergroup as well as in the Symfony community by advocating symfony and as the Community Manager.

Stefan has a wide history in Open Source, having been Support Team Leader for phpBB, documentation translator for Zend Framework and community manager, plugin developer and maintainer plus various other things for symfony.

Stefan is also a best practices advocate. He prefers easy and useful explanations of best practices over the academic and theoretical stuff found in most literature.

Hope you enjoy this interview!

Hello Stefan, first of all, thx for taking the time to answer all our questions.

Can you tell us what projects you are currently working on?

At work I am involved in a big project to build an application that will handle all the administration, provisioning and handling of user accounts etc. for the whole VOiP and connectivity of the services we offer. Aside from that, my main projects are being the Community Manager for symfony and also preparing some new talks for the upcoming conferences.

Read more…

I’m glad to announce that the Adlogix team has been expanded with the addition of the fresh member ‘Dimitri Del Marmol’.

You must be wondering why I am telling you this:
Well actually, he doesn’t know it yet, but in the near future he will be writing on this blog too, sharing his experience and knowledge with u guys.

Anyhow, in the meantime I read a most interesting study about the connectivity for almost every country in the world.
The study is done by Professor Leonard Waverman, London Business School, and economic consulting firm LECG so this is a reliable source.

Belgium’s low 3G penetration amongst consumers is accompanied by a below average rate of broadband penetration.  Broadband speeds and infrastructure also lag behind many of their European counterparts, as does internet usage in general.  This is in contrast to high levels of consumer spending on software.

What universities and companies in Belgium say for years, has now again been confirmed by this study.
Let’s hope that for all the effort and investments companies and consumers do each day, government and network distributors now start acting more professional and leave super profits out of their strategy.
If we want to keep up with the big players in Europe, this has to be done in the near future.

The country is at best a middling performer in terms of production of science and engineering degrees, at both the first degree and doctoral levels. However, the share of ICT investment in total investment appears to be higher in Belgium than in most of the rest of Europe, excluding the UK and the Nordic region.

I guess the Belgian government has no choice and has to act right now as we are a nation with knowledge as only export product.
We are an average country, but we need to be outstanding in this field as we are with Robert Cailliau one of the pioneers of the internet.

Let’s hope that important investments are done, and our tax money doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, whoever they might belong to…

If you want to see how your country is scoring you can take a look at the study here

Hello everybody, I’m back with another version of basic tips and tricks.

After having a talk with a client, about the basic on css, I thought it might be good to have an easy introduction.

So let’s give it a try. We’ll talk about:

• Why would you use css?
• How to insert css in your html file
• How css is written
• Css on objects, classes and unique objects
• Basic css properties and there values
• The pseudo class
• Where to find good information on css

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout.

Read more…