debuggable

Hey folks,

sorry for letting you in the dark for so long, but here is what is currently going on with thinkingphp.org, posttask.com, my new company debuggable and me myself and I:

The future of ThinkingPHP

The bad news first: ThinkingPHP will die. Very soon.

But, thats actually not as bad news as you may think. Tim and I will launch a new blog over at debuggable.com (not accessible yet) by the end of the week. This blog will start out by containing all posts ever published on thinkingphp.org as well as on Tim's blog php-coding-practices.com. Extra bonus: We'll go over every single post (over 200 of them) and mark any outdated / bad information we find. We'll also use this content review to compile a list of topics to blog about again since we can do a better job on the them now and because things have just changed so much. Both of us will commit to doing 1 post per week minium which should make our new blog fairly active compared to the current slacking I've exhibited on this site ; ). After a week or two we'll try to completely move both domains over to point to the new site and hopefully will manage to create a set of redirection rules to keep all current links alive.

Whats up with PostTask.com

Oh boy, if cakefest had never happened PostTask.com would be out of public beta and making money right now. But being locked up with Tim in a plane for 8 hours ruined everything ; ). To explain: We basically sat down (squeezed in tiny airplane seats almost unable to move) and did a brain storming session. It turns out that even so both of us love PostTask and the way it allows you to make your days more organized we both felt that it does a terrible job at managing larger goals & projects. We had some sort of plan for improvement in this area, but we never really saw the path to making it an as powerful project management application as it is a day planner right now. That was until we did the brain storming. Essentially we came up with a series of great ideas on how to take PostTask to the next level where it will kick Basecamp's & Backpack's ass. However, we also realized that some of the stuff is rather ambitious and will take some time (~3 month).

So for now we're going to finish up the JS and interface refactoring we've been working on and take the current PostTask out of beta to promote it as a completely and permanently free tool for day planning. (We might offer some stuff like SSL encryption for money, mainly to test our payment system, but all functionality will be free.)

Client work

Since neither I nor Tim have done any client work since October last year, we're looking into taking on one or two interesting projects for the month(s) to come while PostTask isn't generating any revenue. So if you have a project and are interested in getting your hands on two extremely talented programmers send us some information about your project to: info@debuggable.com.

Workshops & Training

Another thing Tim and I are really interested in, is to do workshops & training with companies or individuals who want to improve their CakePHP, jQuery and coding skills in general. After CakeFest both of us realized that we just love teaching and explaining things to people. For one it is so much more of a joy to teach a man how to fish than to be a commercial fisher. But really, its also great to see how ones own understanding of the subjects improves while teaching. It just forces you to question all of your assumptions and usually interesting questions are brought up by the audience.

We'll publish more info on this as soon as our site is released, but if you run a company and would like to take your employees skills to the next level you can already contact us now and see how we'd be able to help you with this. One of the first workshops we'd love to do is "Understanding JavaScript as a PHP developer", something I already briefly did a CakeFest which seemed to enjoy big interest and potential (you can learn JS really quick as a PHP developer with the right pointers).

We're willing and interested to travel just about anywhere in the world for this and the sessions can be done in either English or German ; ).

Personal plans

Other then having serious fun with business and blogging, I'm also going to make some personal changes. The biggest one is that I'm going to move to Berlin (probably before the end of April). I really enjoy the city and living next door to Tim will also provide to be useful in many ways. Oh, and I'm also going on a trip to Singapore to visit my twin sister there in March. So if anybody living there is reading this and would like to say hi while I'm in the city, please let me know : ).

I also have to get around to uploading my slides from CakeFest, as well as get this new JS library called jayDom released that was the subject of my GUI track talk. So if you don't see a post about the festivities and the new library in the next couple of days make sure to let me know via comments, IM, twitter or whatever ; p. Oh and before I forget: I'm also working on a cool new XPath implementation a la Set::extract right now which has some chance of getting included in the core, so stay tuned.

Alright folks, thats it for now. Its time to go back to work to make all of the above happening!
-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined