2011 has been and gone, all in all an excellent year for me; much better than the few clusterfuck years before. Going into 2012 with tons of positive energy and going to make it even better!

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!

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.

Well, guess it’s time to announce it officially here, too. Since last month I’m running my own little web development company called Hex. After 2 years with the online_team, it was time to move on and turn to new adventures.

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’!

It took me a while to grab myself a copy of Matthew Turland’s “Guide to Web Scraping with PHP“, but a few weeks ago a copy finally arrived and I had the pleasure of reading it. I planned to buy it right as the print copy was announced, but then realised that php|arch accepts only PayPal as the payment method, which doesn’t work from Serbia, so I had to postpone the shopping for some better times. Fast forward 5-6 months and I found a copy on the Book Depository, which has no shipping costs! Yey!

Guide to Web Scraping with PHP

My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I’m really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them. The chapter on HTTP at the beginning and a chapter with some tips and tricks at the end of the book, fit in great with the rest of the chapters, which are full of code examples. For the first reading, I’d recommend reading the book cover to cover, to get an overall view of all the tools presented, but later the chapters can be read independently.

As I said, the first chapter (actually, the second one, the first one is the introductory chapter :p), deals with the HTTP, especially with the parts of it which are needed for understanding, using and creating web scrapers.

The book then continues on different client libraries we can use to send HTTP requests and receive responses. Libraries like cURL or Zend_Http_Client are explained, but it is also explained how one can create his own using streams (the author does note that you’d be better of with an existing one!). For each of the tools it is described, how to handle things like authentication, redirects and timeouts, amongst others…

The second part of the book deals with preparing the documents for, and with the actual parsing of the data from these documents. Again, different tools are presented and explained, which one to use when and why. If none of the parsing tools can help, a most essential overview of the PCRE extension is given, too.

The book is finished with a nice “Tips and Tricks” chapter, which discusses real-time vs batch job scrapers, how to work with forms, the importance of unit testing… IMHO, without this last chapter, the book would not be finished.

I’m thinking hard right now, what bad things could I say about this book, but I can’t think of any. It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that’s exactly what I wanted to know.

Yep, I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in web scraping with PHP :)

After a month or two of pondering and thinking and planning and thinking and some more thinking, today I finally told the management at work that I’ll be leaving in a month from today. Actually, I won’t be extending my contract with them which will end on June 24th.

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’!