Abbas Ali

As mentioned in my earlier post gnuNify was held on Feb 19th and 20th 2010 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Pune.

Aditya and I had submitted two CFPs each and all of them were selected. My first CFP was a talk on Get going with CakePHP and the second one was a 4 hour workshop on CakePHP. GNUnify was my first ever open source conference and I made sure I am well prepared for my presentations.

We reached Pune on 18th Feb and despite being late night arrival, two SICSR students came to pick us up from the airport. We were accomodated at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan’s guest house which was no less than a star rated hotel. I had both my sessions the next day i.e. 19th Feb.

My first session on 19th Feb was a talk on CakePHP at 11 am. Audiences turned up decently and some of them were very excited to get insight of CakePHP framework. My talk included the introduction to web framework and cakephp, history of cakephp, features and MVC in cakephp. I had designed my slides the way so that I can continue the discussion in the workshop scheduled later that day. I believe people got engaged during my talk and they all were looking forward to attend the workshop. There were some interesting questions after the talk.

The second session, a workshop, started at 3:30 pm and most of the people who were present at the talk turned up for the workshop as well. In the workshop we did the basic blog tutorial along with authentication using the Auth Component and model relationships. It took me more than 4 hours to do it and people liked cakephp so much that they were ready to bake some more models and controllers.

I met some wonderful people like Kushal Das, Vivek Khurana, Arun Khan, Dr.Ajit Kumar, Senthil Kumaran, Baishampayan Ghose, Amit Singh, Gautam Rege, Shantanu Oak and many others. They were all experts in their respective fields and presented some great talks and workshops.

The only thing which concerned me was the low audience turnout for the all the sessions. I think this was because they got divided into different halls as 7 tracks were going on simultaneously.

Here are the slides I presented at the talk…

GNUnify is an annual gathering of the techies. It is organised by the students of the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) in association with the Pune GNU/Linux Users Group (PLUG) to provide a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge among the industry professionals, students and academia.

This year’s event has been schedule on 19th and 20th Feb 2010. I had submitted two CFPs and both of them have been selected. This will be my first ever gnuNify. In fact this is going to be my first ever public speaking and I am really looking forward to it.

My sessions:

• Talk : Get Going With CakePHP Framework on 19th Feb at 11:30 AM (Room 707)
• Workshop: Rapid Application Development with CakePHP Framework on 19th Feb at 1:30 PM (Lab 207)

Check out the entire list of sessions and the schedule for  19th and 20th Feb 2010. Looking forward to have a wonderful time and meet new exciting people from the open source world.

My friend Aditya Mooley has written an excellent review of recently held CakePHP Workshop. He says…

Most of the companies working on PHP in Nagpur are still sticking to the old fashioned PHP programming …

I would say this is somewhat a global problem. I am not saying that a framework is the only answer to this issue but people need to follow the new ways of programming. They need to learn new programming patterns and keep up with the latest trends in programming world.

We, at SANIsoft, always thrive to learn new programming techniques and the bleeding edge technologies. Gone are the days when we used to do that old fashioned programming.

I am planning to conduct more workshops on CakePHP in the upcoming 2010 meetups.

For full read please see – CakePHP workshop at Nagpur PHP Meetup

We started PHP Meetup at Nagpur back in July 2009. We are conducting the meetups regularly since then and upcoming December’s meetup will be the 6th edition.

We have had talks and presentations on different topics like Web Security, Introduction to PHP Frameworks, live demonstration of SQL injection and content management systems to name a few. The talks were mostly targeted at beginners of PHP.

I will be delivering a workshop on CakePHP Framework in December’s meetup which is scheduled on 5 Dec, 2009. This workshop will be the first of its kind in Nagpur where a real world application will be built using CakePHP. This will be a very good opportunity for all those PHP programmers who want to learn CakePHP and see a real world application being built right in the front of their eyes.

I expect all attendees to have some basic PHP and web development knowledge. Though I won’t discourage the absolute beginners. They are also free to attend. There will be more workshops on CakePHP at later meetups but this first workshop will be targeted at cakephp newbies.

To attend the meetup please mark your RSVP on the event page.

Meetup date – Saturday, 5th December 2009.
Time – 4 pm to 6 pm
Location – Jog House, F-40, Tatya Tope Nagar, Behind Tatya Tope Hall, Nagpur.

From my earlier post on shortage of good PHP programmers…

Going with the herd :
And the herd generally opts for Microsoft Technologies. If i see a lot of my friends opting for .NET as a career choice then it will be my natural tendency to go with .NET. Students need to overcome this tendency and move away from herd.

I see this as one of the main reasons why there is a lack of talented PHP Programmers in Nagpur (India). No one is willing to take his/her own decision and choose a programming language other than what their friends are learning. Everyone wants to follow what others are doing. Most of the students don’t even know what a particular programming language does but they join a course to learn it just because their friends are doing that course. They treat programming as fashion and always follow the trend. Guys, please understand that clothes and career are two different things. Be brave enough to take your own decisions.

When I was in college the trend was to go for either VC++ or Java. I did some research and found that C is a good choice to start with. I believe that C lays the foundation of programming syntax and logic. C is like God Father of all languages. I started learning C and got adept at the basics of general programming syntax and logic. I suggest everyone to get acquainted with C before starting their programming careers.

I got a job at SANIsoft, in February 2004, as a PHP Trainee. At the time of joining, I didn’t even knew how to write “echo” in PHP. I then started learning PHP and was trained by Dr.Tarique Sani. Initially I was too tempted to look for a new job and work in technologies like VC++, Java or ASP because that was the trend then. But I thought lets give it a shot and move away from the herd (trend).

Gradually my interest in PHP grew and I started liking it. Back in 2004 very very few people have heard of PHP. When my friends asked me on what technology I am working on – they were shocked on hearing PHP. Almost all of them asked me “What is PHP?”. Some of them even laughed at me for breaking the trend and opting for a language which no one have heard about (at least in Nagpur). But I continued with PHP and today I am glad i stuck with it. The fact is that today I am satisfied with both my work and the money I get.

I believe that world is slowly moving towards web based solutions. Desktop solutions are being replaced by web (Ex: Office suite by Google Docs). And when it comes to web, PHP has many advantages over other server side scripting languages. So be courageous and try to choose a programming language other than M$ technologies.

In my earlier post, I had mentioned a few points as to why there is a lack of talented php programmers in Nagpur. In that post I have discussed only the root causes of this paucity. The solutions to those causes will be discussed in a series of topics I will be publishing in the next few weeks.

Today I will try to put forth my thoughts on how to spread the PHP awareness.

PHP is still an alien language for an average college student. I have met a lot of students who have never heard of PHP. Let alone students, the professors/teachers of technical institutes themselves don’t know what is PHP. Until the college students are unaware of what PHP is – its popularity as a career choice and in turn students becoming good PHP programmers is not possible. There are ofcourse few exceptions where students are fully aware of php and are thriving to learn and become good php programmers.

One thing is for sure – If you want to spread the awareness on any topic then the best audience to target are college going students. New topics (in our case programming languages) spread like wildfire amongst college students. I think we need to do the following…

• Start discussing web development with young members of your family and friends. If they get interested, the word will automatically spread amongst their friend circle.
• Don’t discuss PHP directly with an absolute newbie. First make them aware of general web development. Once the interest develops – tell them what are the tools for web development and then introduce to PHP
• Discuss the merits of PHP like free, open source, large community, resources available fairly easily etc..
• Let them know which big websites are using PHP. Ex: Yahoo!, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr and many others.
• Companies working in PHP should come forward and start taking free workshops in colleges. This is one thing which we are considering doing in coming months
• Seasoned PHP developers should form some sort of group and hold regular meetups. Students and beginners should be invited to such meetups. For this purpose we have started Nagpur PHP Meetup which is a monthly event.

I would like to hear what else can be done to spread PHP. Please leave a comment with your suggestions.

We (at SANIsoft) are screening a lot of PHP programmers these days to fill a few vacancies. It looks like there is a dearth of good PHP programmers particularly in Nagpur and generally in India. So what are the reasons for this scarcity? I think the root causes are…

Lack of awareness :

PHP is still an alien language for an average college student. I have met a lot of students who have never heard of PHP. Let alone students, the professors/teachers of technical institutes themselves don’t know what is PHP. Until the college students are unaware of what PHP is – its popularity as a career choice and in turn students becoming good PHP programmers is not possible. There are ofcourse few exceptions where students are fully aware of php and are thriving to learn and become good php programmers.

Going with the herd :

And the herd generally opts for Microsoft Technologies. If i see a lot of my friends opting for .NET as a career choice then it will be my natural tendency to go with .NET. Students need to overcome this tendency and move away from herd.

Lack of good trainers :

Unfortunately in India you need a trainer for learning programming languages. No one is willing to learn on his/her own. As soon as a student goes to university, (s)he starts to search for training institutes. There are very few training institutes offering PHP courses and I will say none of them are good (at least in Nagpur). The sole reason is that the trainer himself/herself is not adept at PHP.

Money Matters :

No matter what, money is the most important thing when one chooses a career. Unfortunately very few MNCs (Multi-National Companies) work in php in India. And those who work, none of them reveals this to general public. You will find newspapers full of ads for jobs in MNCs but none of them mentions php. I think they are afraid of associating themselves with php publicly (reason is unknown). Since only MNCs can offer good salaries (which is fast changing) and they don’t work in php, students don’t opt for php as a career. After all no one wants to earn less money.

Fear of PHP getting vanished in few years :

Everyone wants a stable career and opts for a technology which is everlasting. I see increasing fear amongst newbies that php might vanish after a few years. They think php, being an open source language, won’t survive amongst other closed source alternatives. Their impression is that a technology which has a corporate backing lasts longer and is more secure.

PHP is not the only victim of above mentioned facts but many other languages like ruby, perl and python have the same plight.

[Update 2009-08-28]
Above points are just the problems PHP is facing in India. It is not at all meant to frighten budding PHP Programmers. In my next few posts I will be discussing the solutions for these problems.
[/Update]

What a good start of a perfect weekend. Today morning I appeared for the Zend PHP 5 Certification and PASSED with flying colors. I am now amongst the 85 (as of today) people in India who cleared this certification.

One of the agenda in our next PHP Meetup (on 8th Aug 2009) will be to spread the awareness of Zend Certification amongst php developers in Nagpur.

For the first time in Nagpur, a PHP meetup is being organized on Saturday, 11th July 2009. The entry is free and anyone can come and join the group. All PHP enthusiasts in Nagpur are invited and encouraged to attend the meetup and share their experience working in PHP in particular and web development in general.

You need not be a PHP guru to attend the meetup. In fact any person who is interested in learning PHP can also attend and take the tips directly from PHP gurus. What’s better than to learn form industry people?

Those who are interested in attending the meetup can mark their RSVP on meetup page on facebook (you will need to sign in) or send an email to abbas at sanisoft dot com

Meetup Venue: Jog House, F-40, Tatya Tope Nagar, Behind Tatya Tope Hall
Meetup Date: Saturday, 11 July, 2009
Time: 4 PM to 6 PM

Map:

View meetup location in a larger map

The other day i was chatting with my team mate Shk.Aziz Poonawalla and he inspired me to do a plugin for coppermine which should convert the uploaded documents (txt, pdf, doc, ppt etc..) to Scribd iPaper format and then display them using the Scribd document viewer.

So i went ahead and created such a plugin for coppermine. The plugin requires PHP 5 and CURL on the server and you should register an account on Scribd Platform to get an API key and secret phrase. After installing the plugin whenever a document is uploaded to cpg – it is copied (uploaded) to scribd server as well (behind the scenes). Scribd converts the document to iPaper format on its server and assigns a document id to it. Now when the document is viewed in cpg, we display the Scribd document viewer and supply it the document id. This displays the document in a nice flash viewer.

For further instructions and to download the plugin please see the forum thread.