Sadly, not everything was perfect. In October my grandmother and one of my uncles passed away. Around the same time my Dad’s shop was robbed, twice. That was a tough period for my parents and the entire family, still not over it completely, but not giving up either! We love and support each other and will get out stronger than ever.

Now that the bad part is out, let’s jump to the awesome part ;)

Life changing decisions

In 2011 I actually had three life changing decisions.

First one in March, when I decided to finally quit smoking. And I did it! After 11 years I finally threw that shit away. Gave me a nice self-confidence boost, gained much needed weight – around 10kgs (now just to prevent that turning into fat and into muscles instead) – and I feel much, much better overall.

For the second one I owe a lot to my parents and to Srdjan Vranac, for their continuos support and making it possible to happen. In May I handed over my resignation at my previous job and in June I started my own company, Hex, and joined up with Vranac. Just this one thing changed my life to better in so many ways that I can’t thank Vranac enough for all he did, and is still doing! Thank you :)

The third decision happened in August when I cut my hair. And nope, I didn’t regret it :)

Friends and conferences

This year I spoke at two conferences, DORS/CLUC in May in Zagreb, and Webkonf in October in Budapest. My talks didn’t turn out that good (heck, the second one was pure horror), but I did make new friends which trumps bad talks any day!

In Zagreb I had the honor to meet fellow hacker Nikola Plejić, who kindly offered me a place to stay during the conference and showed me around the city. Now waiting for him to come to Novi Sad so I can return the favor. :)

In Budapest I met fellow hackers Ferenc Kovács and Dubravszky József. Great people with whom I’d like to grab a beer or two this year :)

Open source and hacking

Contributed to web2project and Zend Framework throughout the year, but somewhere in September got really close to a burn out so I decided to back up a little and have a break. I’m trying to ease my way back in to contributing and general hacking now. Need to be careful though, don’t want to get this close to a burn out again, next time might not see the line.

Started to learn C just for fun. Don’t know what to do with it yet, can’t hurt learning/knowing it.

All in all, awesome year which set the bar high for 2012, but with all this positive energy it will be a piece of cake to fly over it!

Happy hackin’ and a happy new year!

The conference was great, and, as per the organizers, attended by more than 700 people! The building is quite big, so I didn’t feel like it was too crowded, but there were some complaints about not having enough seats for everyone. I found it weird that there was no proper lunch time set, with only 15-20 minutes left between sessions, so I ended up eating only after 3PM.

The talks I attended were also great, especially the PHP 5.4 introduction talk by Kovács Ferenc, aka Tyr43l, and the MySQL high availability and the InnoDB data recovery talks by Podor István.

As for my talk… Well, that was just plain horror. I got so nervous at the beginning that I completely forgot what was I supposed to say. A completely blank mind. Just standing there, looking at the slides and not knowing what am I even doing there… Completely fubar’d the first part of the presentation. The second part got somewhat better, but my overall feeling is just… Ugh, kill me now, please.

Anyway, I decided to give up on my speaking “career” and just stick to programming.

Happy hackin’!

The rules are easy:

• Write a post called Oktober(blog)Fest.
• List some of the reasons you like blogs.
• Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
• Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #oktoberblogfest hashtag.
• If we all blog a little more than we normally would this month, maybe we can be reminded of all of the reasons blogs are great.

Well, here I am, pledging that I’ll be blogging a bit more in the coming days/weeks/months. I really do like blogging, don’t know why am I so lazy about it.

Don’t expect anything revolutionary from me tho, heh. An update or two from this weeks Webkonf and maybe some news from the Zend Framework 2 world :)

Happy hackin’!

If you’ll be there, I’d like to meet you :) I’ll be in Budapest from Friday the 7th, till Sunday the 9th.

So, I got a haircut after 8 years.

This is the result. If you want, have a look at the whole album here: There, I fix’d it

I think it turned out pretty damn good.

The plan is simple and that’s to continue to work on things I love: work with PHP and contribute to open source. The rest will be figured out along the way.

I’ve teamed up with my good friend Vranac and his company Code4Hire to do what we’re both good at – writing software. If you need some good programmers, don’t hesitate to contact Vranac or me.

Happy hackin’!

Why? I don’t like the road the leadership of the company has taken (if this can be called a road at all…), the amount of energy the whole team is wasting on some small and silly things, the fact that extra effort is not recognised, thanked or paid and that there’s currently 8 of us in a roughly 25 m^2 room.

I know, there are bad moments everywhere when one just have to suck it up and deal with it for the whole team/company, but I’ve been doing that for quite some time and I had enough of that.

The only thing that makes me sad about this decision is that I’ll be leaving @milosija on his own here, a great mentor and friend from whom I’ve learnt a lot.

On the other hand, as of June 25th I’ll be starting my own company, which should be an exciting new experience. Still need to wrap my head around that one, so more on that in some future post…

Until then,
happy hackin’!

First of all, I’d like to thank Nikola Plejić from NeutrinoDev for having me crash at his place during these couple of days. I hope that I’ll have the chance to return the favor one day :) BTW, if you need some Drupal/PHP/Python work done, you should talk to Nikola, he’s a kick ass dev ;)

The overall feeling I have about this conference is GODDAMN THIS IS AWESOME I WANT MOAR!!!1! Seriously, great organising, great talks, great speakers, great people, great food, great town, great WiFi. Granted, I haven’t attended a lot of conferences so far, but I honestly doubt it can get a lot better than this.

Organisation

I really can’t say anything bad about the organisation. Before the conference the organisers where responsive via email and twitter for any questions/comments I had, the conference website was updated regularly. During the conference they worked hard to keep everything in order, to reduce the delays and to keep the coffee machine full of hot coffee at all times :)

Talks and speakers

The first day had Mark Shuttleworth, from Canonical and outter space as the keynote speaker with a talk generally on open source and Ubuntu. Adnan Hodžić gave one of the best talks about his experience on organising DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Other talks included web and mobile development, OpenStreetMap and some hardcore talks on LXC virtualization and MySQL fatal crash recovery.

The second day had Jan Wildeboer, Red Hat’s evangelist as the keynote speaker, with a great talk on open source. Other talks were about some business wishy-washy (I skipped those :P), databases, open source in academia… Personally, I think the first day was better, but nevertheless the second day was great and interesting too.

Although a bit exhausting, as both days had more than 10 hours of talks, it was really worth it. Now only if I had more hours in a day so I could play around with and look more into all of the stuff I learned here.

In the end, I’m really glad I came here, will be here next year too. If you’re into open source (and you better be! :P), I only can recommend you to check out and keep an eye on DORS/CLUC next year.

Until next time,
happy hackin’!

Hopefully I’m not going to be the only PHP dev there and someone will find the talk(s) worth their time :D

More than anything I’m looking forward to finally visiting Croatia and meeting fellow hackers :)

Actually I really don’t know what one has to do to create a user group, but I’ll just improvise along the way. So far, the date, time and the place for the first meeting is set: April 5th, 6PM, in a local coffee shop by the Danube river. A website thingy is also up: pugns, which is currently just a simple HTML page, but things will improve on that front too. The page of pugns is intentionally under a “directory”, because I’d love to host information about other PHP user groups from around here on the phpug.phpplaneta.net (sub)domain. It’d be nice to keep all relevant information under one “roof”.

Sooo… This will be an interesting ride, hope it’ll turn out fine :)

Of course, if anyone has some advice, tips and tricks about organizing user groups please do share them, that would be highly appreciated :)