About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.

Time for a new adventure. Last monday, my wife Marjolein and I visited the local Chamber of Commerce to register our new company: Ingewikkeld. We're both doing completely different things, but we've decided to capture both into a single company because it saves us a shitload of administrative work, and since we're married anyway, it doesn't really matter. I (could you have expected something else?) will be offering (PHP) development, consultancy and training services, and my wife will be a baby wearing consultant.

This week there was an interesting discussion on twitter between several people from the PHP community on the use of access modifiers, and why things should be public, protected or private, or why not. The thing that triggered this was the fact that the new Symfony2 Coding Style disallows the usage of private methods. This discussion earlier on triggered Lukas Smith to post his opinion. I commented there but the comment became thus long that I decided to write a blogpost about it myself.

Just like last year I will again be present this year at the Symfony Day Cologne, which is organized by my friends at Interlutions. Last year was a huge success with many attendees, a wonderful list of speakers, and a great party afterwards. This year will be at least just as good, and is slightly extended: I will be doing a full-day symfony workshop not just on the Symfony Day but also on the day after.

As happened the past years I was at the Dutch PHP Conference this year. Something was different though, this year. I've hardly seen a conference talk this year at DPC. This was because I was part of the PHPBenelux team responsible for running the DPC Uncon, which was held for the first time parallel to the main conference. And what an awesome uncon it was!

Only a couple of more days until the Dutch PHP Conference takes place again in Amsterdam. I am already really looking forward to it and I know many others feel the same way. With this year's line up of speakers and topics, the conference again proves to be the best conference for people looking for advanced topics. But this year's edition of DPC has another addition: A fourth track, with no schedule so far: The DPC Uncon.

So today is the last day of the European WinPHP Challenge. Unfortunately I didn't have as much time as I had hoped to spend on my entry, MediTerra. Still, I believe I have a nice working version of MediTerra, at least as far as blobs and to a lesser extent tables go.

With the deadline looming (tomorrow is the last day we can work on our projects) I've spent some time today to really get some stuff done. I hope to do some more stuff tomorrow, but at least right now I've got most of the blob stuff in there.

After having set up my environment and started my first coding, yesterday I actually got to play around with Azure. And really, it isn't all that hard! Things like "cloud computing" and "Azure Storage" sound complicated, but I found out that, using the right tools, working with that is a breeze.

So time for some work on my European WinPHP Challenge entry tonight. Previously, I worked on setting up my Windows environment, and now it's time to work on getting my basic PHP setup running and configure the webserver to actually serve my PHP stuff.

Error pages. Most people don't really consider error pages when building a website or application. They usually contain some debug information so that when something goes wrong the developer knows what is wrong. But in a lot of cases when an application goes into production, this information is still exposed.

Since I am not working with a Windows environment on a day-to-day basis, the first task for the WinPHP Challenge for me was to actually install a Windows environment and get my development environment up and running.