Who is Kris Wallsmith?
I’m a self-taught coder who cut my teeth building brochure-ware sites for a few hundred bucks a pop. I’m now active in the open source community, Release Manager for the PHP Symfony Framework, and a Senior Software Engineer at OpenSky.
Where and when did you start programming?
I started coding in 2000 when I decided the non-profit organization I was running needed an online presence. Dreamweaver was my first teacher. I eventually picked up CSS and a real text editor.
Why did you start with Symfony?
I learned symfony while recovering from surgery to repair a torn ACL in my knee, four years ago (this week, actually). I was Technical Director at a local agency at the time and wanted to standardize development to a common framework. I picked Symfony based on its reputation for sticking to best practices and phenomenal documentation. After a few years as a user and plugin developer I travelled to Amsterdam in September 2008 for Symfony Camp, where I volunteered to be Community Manager. I eventually left that role to take on the role of Release Manager.
What makes Symfony2 the Next Big Thing?
Symfony2 is a lazy, explicit and blazingly fast framework. It makes very few assumptions about what you want to do and how you want to do it. This means you end up writing a bit more code, but your application is much faster because of it.
Top 5 Symfony2 features?
Symfony2 is still under active development, but my current list of favorite features looks something like this…
- The flexible dependency injection container
- The new web profiler GUI for debugging all aspects of a Symfony request (similar to the WebKit web inspector or Firebug, but server-side)
- POPO controller classes: light and unit testable
- Integration with Doctrine2 and the Doctrine MongoDB ODM
- Support for edge-side includes
What does your typical day look like?
I wake up sometime between 3:30 and 5:30am, make some coffee, catch up on Twitter and chat with folks across the pond. If there’s work to do I’ll start coding, otherwise tear through a few chapters from whatever novel I’m reading (currently the Millennium trilogy). Once the rest of the family wakes up (usually at a more reasonable hour) we do breakfast and get the kids off to school. I’ll spend the rest of the day hacking on OpenSky, Symfony, and/or any other project that’s caught my eye.
What do you do in your free time?
Spend time with my family, walk the dog, play soccer, bike around town, sing in a community choir, read, ignore Twitter…
Current favorite apps?
Terminal :)
What OS do you prefer?
Mac.
Small picture for your Workplace?
Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?
I’m a big fan of MooTools but haven’t had much opportunity to use it lately. jQuery is also very elegant.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Someone at PHP Matsuri in Tokyo gave a presentation about creating programming camps for young adults. I think this is a great idea and hope to get something like this started on a small scale here in Portland.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I like being on a team of developers devoted to and with ownership of a product. Freelance of FT doesn’t really matter.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?
Well, 2010 is almost over. I’ve been wanting to speak more internationally, a goal I was able to realize during travels to Japan and Europe over the past month.