Zend Certified Engineer: PHP5 (ZCE 200-500)

From this day on I can proudly say that I am a PHP5 Zend Certified Engineer.

I took the ZCE 200-500 exam today at a Pearson-Vue authorized testing center, Provision Romania, after registering online, just a business day before.

I have read the Zend PHP5 Certification Study Guide from PHP Architect and I also bought the Practice Exam Pack with 10 questions (I used only 3 tests to prepare). If you want to take the same road as me, I suggest you get the Zend PHP5 Certification Bundle as you’ll save some money in the process.

I have to say I am not an expert in all areas covered by the ZCE exam, but I manage very well in all of them.

The Practice Exam Pack did help me in getting in the state of mind needed for the exam. Also I came across a few things which I would have missed in the real exam, had it not been for a few tricky / theoretical questions.

The problem is that these practice tests are not enough to prepare you for the real exam. I found a few tricky questions including printf parameters and SoapClient / SoapServer usage that were not in the Practice Tests, but I also observed that the XML coverage is emphasized in the PHPArch Practice Tests.

I learned some things I didn’t know in PHP after reading the Study Guide and I recommend reading it as it is a very good book even if you are not preparing for the ZCE exam.

Overall it was not the hardest exam I took and I managed to finish the whole 70 questions (plus review them) in around 1 hour more or less.

I do not know how the ZCE Certification will help my career, but I am happy and proud to be a member of the ZCE Group and I am the 29th certified ZCE in Romania. I am also the second Romanian person to obtain the ZCE in 2009, followed only after a few hours later by Ionut Voda.

If you’re a Romanian from Bucharest, Romania (or just passing by) I strongly recommend Provision Security Training as they were very professional and the process of getting Zend Certified was as simple as possible !

If you have any questions about the ZCE exam or anything PHP related, post them in the comments section and I will try to answer them the best I can !

Good luck if you’re preparing to apply for the ZCE exam !

Howto (prop)set SVN:ignore from the command-line !?

If you’re a developer you’ve probably worked with SVN.

And if you’ve worked with SVN you’ve probably had the problem that it’s commiting and updating more than you want.

So here’s a quick way to ignore the files you dislike:

• If you want to ignore just a file, for example "config.php" from the "config" directory:

svn propset svn:ignore "config.php" /path/to/config

• If you want to ignore all the files in a directory, for example the "cache" directory:

svn propset svn:ignore "*" /path/to/cache

(quick warning here ! "*" is different from "*.*"; the latter implies that you have files or directories with extensions and it will not match a file/dir with no extension)

• If you’re an Apple Fanboy like me than this one’s for you; MacOS has the annoying habbit of creating .DS_Store files in every directory, including those under SVN

edit "~/.subversion/config" with your favorite editor (vi, nano or even TextEdit)

search for the line that contains "global-ignores" and add ".DS_Store" at the end of the row

save it and you’re done; no more .DS_Store junk in your repository !

I hope this quick guide helps you. I’ve written this because most so called coders out there use tools like TortoiseSVN and have no clue how to use SVN from the command line.

If you have other usefull SVN command-line tips, please share them in the comments !

The 2009 working season begins !

Mornin’ everybody !

Today marks the new working season of 2009 ! I guess most of you didn’t work from January 1st until today and probably most of you will not even start working today, but there are a few unfortunate ones that will start working.

I wish you all a better year than the one behind us and may all your dreams and hopes come true !

Life is short ! Play more !