Dreambookers…
Nachdem ich den Artikel über Dreambookers bei Tourismus-Zukunft gelesen hatte wollte ich eigentlich auf ExcitingTravel ein Feature drüber schreiben. Nur darf ich nicht rein.
Ich bin schlicht nicht gut genug. Und nein 
es geht auch nicht mit einer anderen eMail Adresse…. Schade eigentlich…
Upcoming Talks
This year will be very interesting as I will present two talks in Rome, Italy at the PHP Conference. As this will be my first time in Rome I am really looking forward to visit this fabulous place.
My Talks will be:
Monitor your Business
The most important thing happening in your website is the business process. So why should you monitor your database and your webserver only when your business is failing? Monitoring is not only about hardware and databases - it’s also about the internals of your application. Learn how to monitor your business using PHP and how to create nice, good looking management compatible graphs.
This talk will be a highly improved version of the talk I have held at the IPC 2008.
And something new, and (I hope) quite interesting:
Why Architecture in Web Development matters
Choosing the right software architecture for your project is very important. Besides the framework decision there are many other key issues you need to take into account and which have an impact on such things like maintainability, scalability and also the frequency of possible deployments. In this session you will to learn why you have to remove Co-dependency in your source code, which patterns there are for successful scaling and how the choosen framework influences your architecture.
Hope to see you in italy 
Outsourcing and Quality…
Yesterday night I’ve received an interesting comment on my PHP@INDIA posting. After reading I’ve decided that this deserves a posting to answer it thoroughly.
The comment was
The poster who made this statement doesn’t explain to you that India-based workers can only speak about 60% english.
he doesn’t explain that these same developers use BEGINNER LEVEL coding techniques that render your site open to almost the most grade-school level of attacks.
he doesn’t explain to you that these same developers don’t give a damn about you, or your project.
he doesn’t explain to you that their answers to questions are from monitors on their screen, and should you have an advanced-level technical question they are NOT going to be able to answer for you.
And he also didn’t explain that you GET what you PAY for. You pay for garbage in India, expect garbage as a product. You pay good in America for a product, expect the best as a product.
The commentor is right in his statements. Actually talking about Quality in outsourcing you need to take care that the quality is good enough for you. It would be simply very dumb to rely on any developer - check it personally! I’ve made the same experience 10 years ago like my anonymous commentor, but I had to understand that things changed and that it is possible now to get better quality. But as always - you need the right partner.
After reading my posting again I’ve realized that I need to clearify a few things. Outsourcing (in PHP area!) is never about saving money. Having good people inhouse or around the corner will help your project a lot. Outsourcing is about scaling. If you do have any tasks which need to be scaled, like developing the same stuff again and again, editing pictures, running any process against something which need to be repeateded over and over then you should think about offshoring.
I state that it’s very difficult to scale your team from 5 to 15 inhouse fast - and this is possible in india. Simply because there are many indians.
A few rules need to be applied to choose the right partner:
- Do never ever give your core technology to any outsourcer somewhere on this planet. You need to have full control over your technology. Otherwise the risk of beeing ripped off is very high.
- Choose your partner thorougly. Check the references and call them to doublecheck.
- Be aware of your expectations. You will need a few months before the project will run by itself.
- if you do not put in energy, knowhow and your personal sweat it won’t work.
Follow these rules and your outsourcing project will be successful.
To come to an end - yes, also in india you get what you pay for. This is valid anywhere on the planet. Pay your developers well and you will get good quality. And for sure you can not judge over all people in a country - there are good and bad developers all over the planet. Even though it is hard to believe - just beeing american doesn’t make you a good developer - and vice versa - beeing indian doesn’t make you a bad developer.
PHP@INDIA ?
Did you ever wonder if these Millions of Indian developer we often read about are capabale of doing good in PHP? I did. And I tried.
Back in my past (*cough* - hitting 40 soon…) I’ve outsourced parts of my jobs to many countries, starting with a company in Prague/Czech Republic together with my friend Matthew, and moving later on to lithuania where I still run (together with my mate wolfgang) a development office with a total of 60 developers, coding for various projects like swoodoo or oxid.
During these nearly 25 years I did work for sure in a few projects where coding was outsourced to india. My experience in the past was not really good. The classical project in india was:
- huge
- really huge
- f.. huge
did I mention huge?
Why is that so? Well - the average indian developer is (was!) teached to work as some sort of coding-ant. Don’t think, just do what you gotta do (futurama). Thus this ended in a culture where you need to write a very detailed spec ( thousands of pages) and hand this over to your “ant” farm where 500-1000 developers code what you told them todo. Still you need to check personally the quality as (in the past!) the indian culture does not support being honest in case of problems as this is considered rude. Ah - being rude… tell me.. the ones out there who had the pleasure… to meet me in person know that I am a really honest person thus it is very easy that myself is been taken as rude….
So this was the past - 12 years ago. In 2008 I’ve started a second try - and guess what ? It worked! After investigating the right partner via my personal network I’ve started to work with Anantara. A small company, with very bright minds in management, reliable and trustworthy. Nothing what you can expect anywhere on the planet.
Anantara was working in the usual areas - Java and .NET but not very much in PHP. So I helped them a bit to kickstart a fresh PHP team - and they kept their promises and delivered a good working team. To my pleasure they realized that the PHP area is a very interesting market to them, so they decided to put a lot of energy in this area - sic! Times are really changing, especially now when we talk about the crisis - it matters what you pay for your software, and PHP is simply a lot of cheaper (aka faster) developed compared to .NET and java.
Don’t get me wrong - outsourcing is always difficult and by far less efficient compared to in-house developers. You always have to bridge a cultural/business gap which is most likely there. You can’t expect that some people anywhere on the planet earth understand your business needs without teaching them thoroughly.
But - in the past I had much worse experiences - and now I’ve really enjoyed to work with Anantara the last year. Our project stopped now, as it ended succesfully, but I am definitly looking forward to work with these guys in future again. From a PHP skill level I would estimate that there is average know how - which is better than many code I’ve seen in the last years developed in germany. Needless to say that they do agile development - what else…;)
So - if you are interested in contacting them or you do have any other question concerning outsourcing - feel free to contact me. I’ve decided to support Anantara a bit as I really do like them - and no - I am not paid, nor am I a shareholder there. Most likely they will pay me a beer (or two…)
7 things….
Already a few days ago I got tagged by Manuel Pichler and Gaylord Aulke. I could not post as I was really sick the last two weeks. Today is the first day where I see light at the end of the tunnel and I feel good enough to answer the questions.
So you really want to know seven things about me ? Well - you asked for it
1. I earned my first money by creating a blackmarket in secondary school for sexual explicit material, which I bought cheap and sold expensive. This was one of the reasons I had to leave this school.
2. My first love was named Commodore 64. I teached myself Assembler and started to rip off music from games, creating my own demos.
3. My holidays are usually spent in croatia as my beloved wife was born there.
4. I work with a bunch of developers in lithuania, and hey - these guys (and girls!) are really good.
5. Recently I donated my book collection of > 2500 science fiction and fantasy books to a shop where handicapped sell the books to life from that.
6. Although I was born in bavaria my limit are 3 litres of beer, after that I am really really drunk.
7. I can’t stand cold weather - I feel well at an average of 26+ degrees. Oh, do you remember 4. ? In .lt the winters are really really REALLY cold and I hate it.
So - now my turn. Not so easy. I think nearly everybody who I know was already tagged, therefore - sorry about that - I need to tag a bunch of german people who I think are not yet tagged by this meme.
Here we go:
1. Nils Langner for teaching PHP
2. Thorsten Rinne just to remember him that he still ows me a self cooked thai menu.
3. Xenjo because I am curious what he would write….
4. Ralf Eggert to support his upcoming Zend Framework book (in german only)
5. Christopher Kunz who runs partly my servers for swoodoo and takes care about themeven from holiday. Thanks Chris !
6. Tomas Liubinas one of the .lt developers I mentioned and actually he was part of the team who won in plat-forms contest.
7. Max Horvath for… hmm… I still wait for the pics
These are the rules apparently:
Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.