Of (PHP) Sessions, Cookies, and Authentication

Do you know the difference between the PHP config directives session.gc_maxlifetime and session.cookie_lifetime? Have you wrestled with implementing a “Remember Me” button on your login page? Learn how popular sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, keep you logged in (apparently) forever and the security risks of such methods.

Who’s Using Your Software?

Software is only successful if someone can use it. Good developers need to do more than just follow specifications, they need to visualize the people who will use it and understand what they need. Get to know your users and the questions you need to ask to make your implementation a success on all fronts.

This is a great thing, and kudos and support goes to Andy Erickson and Dr. Hazem Said for their work so far.

This past Tuesday I gave a short talk to students in the Innovation Seminar series in CAS at UC about what’ it’s like to work in a startup from a coder’s point of view.  I talked about transitioning from a cubicle farm job to a startup environment, the nature and pace of working in a startup, and the tons and tons of learning that is inevitable.

You won’t get a lot from these slides without the narrative, but I post all my talks here so I thought I’d post this one.

Cross-posted on my Cincinnati blog.

In which I give a short introduction to unit testing, and then outline the story that finally turned on the light bulb about real test-driven development and test first for me. The third part of the talk gives an introduction to Dependency Injection (DI), an integral part to unit testing.

Here are the talks I attended:

• The Future Is Not Yet Widely Distributed (Intro To Git)
• Map, Filter, Reduce – In The Small And In The Cloud
• You Look You Could Use Some REST
• Exploring Artificial Intelligence With Python
• Extending Existing Web Services With SMS And XMPP
• Get Soaked: Streams, an In-Depth Look
• Test Drive Your Development Process

The most interesting one for me, uh, emotionally was probably the AI talk.  Brings me back to my days in SB.  The most useful topic which I could probably put to use at work tomorrow was the SMS/XMPP talk.

I managed to make it downtown one night, and got to meet some new people.

The last highlight I’ll mention were the Pecha Kucha talks on Thursday night.  It was interesting and a ton of fun.  The open bar didn’t hurt either.

See a few more photos from php|works 2008.

Now, I’ve never even attended a conference of this size, much less presented at one.  So this will be interesting to say the least.  I’m filled with a range of emotions ranging from trepidation to excitement (which is true of most of the things in my life of late.)  I also hope to meet some of the PHP bloggers I read regularly.

But I feel ready.  I gave this talk in April to OINK-PUG.  The one for this week is virtually the same.  Then, for practice, I also gave the talk to the Columbus and Indianapolis PHP meetups in the last two weeks.

Slides for the talk are in the next post.