NYCPHP Meetup

[David Costa]

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Dear Sirs,
Am responsible for dotgeek.org a small albeit promising site about php 
and open source platforms.

We recently published the results of our first PHP Programming Marathon 
(which was kindly sponsored by Zend and Suse) at
http://marathon.dotgeek.org

We are planning to open soon a tutorials section.  There is an idea of 
preparing a PHP certification system where in lieu of evaluating the 
performance on a standard questionnaire, we do evaluate the programmers 
skills based on 10 code samples or tutorials posted on our site.

I am currently looking for some PHP experts to join the board. This 
will imply an occasional review of the programmers that posted 10+ 
tutorials/snippets via an online system.

  (To clarify, all certifications will be offered free, the site has no 
ads and is entirely self financed. I am not doing this as a business or 
something).

if anyone of your staff or user group is interested, please let me 
know. You might find below our first draft with the information on the 
current board members.

Thanks in advance for your time and attention

David


dotGeek PHP Programming Certification

	The system allows you to post tutorials in order to earn a 
certification in
PHP.  We have a well qualified certification board that will analyze all
postings.  The system works as follows:

	1) You have the ability to upload tutorials in the system for
certification.
		You have ability to develop tutorials for any purpose to post to this
site.  With that you will submit the purpose or functionality of that
tutorial.  You may submit as many as you want.  Be sure all submitted
tutorials only use classes that are inherent in PHP or are submitted 
with
the tutorial.  A user with just PHP 4.? should be able to take your 
code and
run it without having to load extra packages.
	2) After you have posted 10 quality tutorials you will have the 
ability to
request certification.
		You will select 10 of the tutorials you have posted to be evaluated.  
Be
sure these 10 tutorials fit the criteria stated below.
	3) The certification board will evaluate the tutorials according to the
criteria described below.
		The certification board will respond within 30 business days as to 
whether
the 10 tutorials posted all pass.  The names and qualifications of the
members of this board are below.
	4) If you pass the certification you will have access to an electronic
certificate and receive an email containing the certificate.
		For submitting 10 quality tutorials, you will be sent an electronic
certification indicating you are a certified PHP developer.  This along 
with
your tutorials can be used to enhance your resume and indicate your 
skill
set to your current or future employers.

	The following is the criteria used to determine whether you should be
certified as a PHP developer.

	1) Tutorial accomplishes its purpose.
		Attached to the tutorials is a description of the tutorial's
functionality.  The written tutorial must accomplish all goals set 
forth by
the programmer. A programmer must be able to understand what they wrote 
and
describe it to a fellow programmer or even someone who does not program.
	2) Cleanliness/Readability of code.
		Programmers need to make their code easy to hand off to other 
programmers
either for continued development or to help debug.  This is done through
comments and extra spacing to make statements readable.
	3) Error handling.
		This is important for PHP because it is often implemented in web 
pages and
crashing code can help hackers understand what is in the PHP script.  
Users
hate crashing code (they dislike it more than error messages).

PHP Certification Board
	The PHP Certification Board is made up of people with varying 
backgrounds
in the PHP development industry.  They are in charge of looking through
posted tutorials and making sure that they fit the above stated 
criteria.
The following are the members of the current PHP Certification Board:

David Costa
Job: Associate Professor at a Swiss private College
Qualifications: Law School graduate (Law School, University of 
Northumbria at Newcastle), Stanford Certified Project Manager (School 
of Engineering, Stanford University) EDP, (Sloan School of Management, 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Software Engineering  
(University of Oxford)
Project Manager at CollegeLinux, PHP Enthusiast

Anthony L. Faulds
Job: Software Engineer
Qualifications: M.S. Aerospace Engineering (Pennsylvania State 
University) M.A. Mathematics,  B.S. Aerospace Engineering, B.S. Applied 
Computational Mathematics (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State 
University)





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