⇥ Yeah, yeah, I’m still alive…

… I’ve just had a couple of really nasty months!

Whereas summers are usually a sleepy time at MTA, this year we ended up making several major releases in the span of forty-five days—and that has made for a very, very busy time.

As some of you may have noticed, we recently released a completely revised training program. Training has been a major source of revenue for us, but the fact that it wasn’t a properly-organized business had been bothering me for a while. While we had a great set of training courses and two killer trainers, we lacked a cohesive program that could help people from all levels of PHP knowledge increase their skill in a logical progression.

Imagine walking into a school and being confronted with Math 101 alongside advanced algebra—it’s perhaps great if you’re either a complete newbie, or if you are looking for a challenge, but, if you’re somewhere in between… you’re in trouble.

This is the kind of problem that we aimed to fix with our new program, and it took us a considerable amount of research and development to get there—Paul started discussing the possibility of coming up with a new training program sometimes in February.

I have to say I am rather proud of the end result. We now have a complete set of training courses that feed into each other in a nice and logical manner—progressive from an introductory PHP course all the way to advanced topics, including what I believe is one of the only courses dedicated to learning Adobe Flex from a PHP developer’s perspective in the world (which I will be teaching!).

Coupled with a completely new backend system that finally allows students to manage their own training directly without the intervention of our customer support folks, I think that our new training program will be a great addition to the PHP world.

We even have a completely revamped training system, written entirely from scratch to provide support for a host of new features (Project #2 for yours truly). The new system expands on our previous training technology to include several features that were sorely missing—things as simple as seeking through recordings (which is much more complicated to implement than one would imagine), but also elements like integration with S3 for security and scalability, which will help us relaunch our webcast series shortly.

Rewriting the training system (or, as I prefer to call it, the “straining” system) was a huge challenge, partly because I kept butting against some of the arbitrary limitations built into the Flash and Flex frameworks by Adobe (although they are getting better at making their products more open to everyone), and this time I wanted to resolve those conflicts intelligently rather than just hacking around them like I did the first time (which, come to think of it, was three years ago!). I’m quite happy with the end result, and look forward to deploying it in the real world.

In any case, it seems that a new challenge is much overdue, so I’ll get thinking. In the meantime, PHP 4 is dead… I’m going to the wake.