Bob den Otter

Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with a new project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. It generates for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start! - Bob den Otter

A fairly constant montra I see around here is "learn a framework/CMS, and customize that to fit". I've been doing PHP development professionally for 8 years, and even more as a hobby. My experience, with both sides of this question, has been slightly different. While using a CMS has been useful when a client needs to frequently update content, I've often found that no matter which CMS I learn (and I've learned many) the customer requirements are often prohibitively expensive to implement inside of a CMS as opposed to a custom built project. Sometimes this is related to the database structure, other times it's related to various kinds of sandboxing that "protects" me from accessing areas of the CMS. Excuse me, but if I'm in the code creating applications, I either know what I am doing, or I shouldn't be in the code. - Bob den Otter

Git is the distributed version control system that's taking the world by storm. The Linux kernel, Ruby on Rails, and now even Erlang/OTP have all chosen it as their VCS of choice. This talk will focus on mastering the handful of commands that comprise 90% of the functionality you will use on a day-to-day basis. I'll kick things off with the best method to install Git on your favorite platform. Next up is creating local repositories, staging/adding files (all about the index), making commits, and viewing history. From there you'll learn - Bob den Otter

Requests is a HTTP library written in PHP, for human beings. It is roughly based on the API from the excellent Requests Python library. Requests is ISC Licensed (similar to the new BSD license) and has no dependencies. Despite PHP's use as a language for the web, its tools for sending HTTP requests are severely lacking. cURL has an interesting API, to say the least, and you can't always rely on it being available. Sockets provide only low level access, and require you to build most of the HTTP response parsing yourself. - Bob den Otter

Collect, test, and experiment with interface pattern pairings of CSS & HTML. Pears is an open source WordPress theme, enabling people like you to get your own pattern library up and running quickly. Grab the theme at Github. Install the theme. Create markup & style patterns. Learn. - Bob den Otter