2010 - My Year In Review
Written by Ashley Broadley on Friday, 31st December 2010 at 11:25
Well, it's New Years Eve. Christmas has been and gone and 2011 is almost upon us.
2010 has been a hectic, but exciting, year for me. A lot has changed, and I've had a massive amount of fun whilst watching everything around me change. Which seems to have led to me to coin a new motto in life: "Fuck it, why not?".
My most memorable parts of 2010 were:
Canada - May
I decided to go and visit my parents for a couple of weeks. I remember arranging everything with my Dad and deciding not to tell my Mum and Sister. Then two weeks before departure, my Dad and I thought it was probably not a good idea for me to just turn up on the doorstep as my Mum would have probably have had a heart attack. I remember being on the phone to my Mum and Sister announcing that I was going to be visiting them in less than two weeks time, having my ear blown off by the screams of excitement! Needless to say they were looking forward to it. As was I. After all, it had been 7 months since I last visited.
Jaegerbombs, Immi "upstating her datus", Hudsons Buffalo Wings, Moose, Jasper, snow, 5 pin bowling (which by the way is pretty difficult!), seeing someone move house (literally moving their house!) - All fantastic moments.
May was also the month that Leeds United came top of the playoffs and were promoted to the Championship. I streamed the match while I was visiting my parents at 8am Canadian time - shouting my head off for Leeds to win.
Moving Out - May/June
Probably the biggest step anyone can take to gain total independence. I found a nice little flat within walking distance of Leeds City Centre and within 15 minutes driving from the bulk of my friends. I also found a great person to share the flat with. She was up for fun just as much as I was.
I feel moving out has prepared me for the wider world of home ownership and also helped me become completely independent.
Amsterdam - July
My first time in the 'dam. A week of camping in the middle of summer. I honestly don't think there could have been a better way to spend this trip. Visiting the Sex Museum. Seeing two men sat on a sofa on a makeshift raft floating on the canal. Getting a comprehensive guided tour around the city by our very own Phill. Spending the day in a park just getting messed up. Sampling the local culture.
Learning to Snowboard - August
August was all about getting into Snowboarding. Best. Sport. Ever. Spent a full day getting taught how to snowboard (by a very attractive young lady) at Castleford Xscape. Turns out that snowboarding is something that would lead to some awesome times and also some painful ones.
Getting to Know People - September
September seemed to be the month for making new friends or getting to know new-ish friends a lot better. After meeting Dave and Caroline whilst learning to Snowboard back in August, I was invited to to celebrate Dave getting a job by partying down in Sheffield. I had an awesome time and met some interesting people.
So, during September, I got to know Dave and Caroline and met Katie. Who knew they would all become such good friends?
I Got Older - November
In November I turned 24. The people in the office know me too well, buying me a create of my favourite beers, a pre-painted mug with the lyrics to "Balls Deep". I had a fantastic time out on the town in Leeds. I also think I broke some kind of World Record - 19 Jaegerbombs in one night, and still standing.
Also got some new bindings, a helmet and some goggles for snowboarding. I couldn't wait to try them out!
Discovered my new favourite film in the world. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. It's the most ridiculous film ever to be made. And it's totally EPIC! If you haven't seen it, go watch it. Right now. Before you do anything else.
It snowed for the first time in 2010 towards the end of November. Really got me in the mood for MOAR BAORDING! I helped Dave and Caroline move home - which led to an epic night of BBQ'ing in the snow. Can't get much more manly than that.
A Time for Family, Friends and Fun - December
December is that time of year when companies have their Christmas parties. The company I work for was no exception. The do its self wasn't that great, but with the help of the people I work closely with we made it an awesome night. Especially after two bottles of red wine to myself.
Snowboarding in Scotland was EPIC. Lots of alcohol consumed, lots of snowboarding, lots of food and lots and lots of laughs. My first time on a mountain snowboarding and I loved it. Even though the snow wasn't great it was a fantastic experience. I think Dave, Caroline, Slinky and Katie all helped make this little excursion an awesome time!
I spent Christmas this year with an Aunt and her family. Was a lovely little Christmas and of course the food was great! I think I managed to eat enough to feed 5,000!
Looking Ahead
2011 looks to be just as promising. In January I'm going to Austria for more snowboarding fun. Another visit to Canukland in March and hopefully lots more exciting stuff to come.
Now I'm not one to usually make New Years Resolutions, but I thought "fuck it, why not?". So far my list is as follows:
- Fix knee - I damaged it quite badly snowboarding.
- Fix shoulder - damaged, again by snowboarding.
- Buy a house.
- Get in shape.
- Learn a new language - Maybe Japanese? Or get back in German?
- Blog more often.
- Make 2011 better than 2010.
In Conclusion...
2010 was a great year for me and I hope it was for you too.
Now, let's get down to the important stuff - partying like it's 1999! Have an excellent night and I wish you and your families all the best for 2011. Makes the best of what you can and have fun whilst doing it!
Happy New Year everyone! Peace out!
Tags: #2010was,, #awesome, Comments: Be the first!
Getting Started With Zend Framework 2 Development & Git
Written by Ashley Broadley on Wednesday, 22nd September 2010 at 20:37
Welcome!
This is a brand new blog, and with it, I intend on focusing on the development of Zend Framework (from here on referred to as ZF) 2. I will document the processes which I undergo, the problems I encounter, the solutions to the problems and hopefully, much, much more.
The reasons I chose ZF are that it's a great framework with many fantastic components and it has a very knowledgeable community, plus it's free and open source. I myself am very keen on OSS, and would love to be in a position where I can give back to the community. I initially decided to contribute to ZF1 and signed the Contributors License Agreement, which meant that I could submit proposals for new components, bug reports, patches and a whole load of other things. Unfortunately for me, I'm quite lazy when it comes to doing work outside of work, even though I do love web development.
So, first things first. A little about ZF2. It's currently undergoing a massive transition, getting the core components converted into using PHP Namespaces (Namespaces are something new to PHP5.3 and to myself). The framework aims to do lots of things, too many to talk about here but all of which can be found by looking through the ZF2 wiki page.
Git is also something that's new to me. I've used SVN before and more recently, Mercurial. Mercurial is quite similar to Git, in that it's a distributed source control management system. So hopefully I will learn a lot about Git, as well as ZF2 and Namespaces.
What Next?
So, where do we start? Well, we start by getting the source code for ZF2! "And how do we do that?" I hear you say. Well, let me show you. I'm basically going to explain everything that can be found on the ZF2 Wiki about getting the source, except I will focus on using GitHub.
Firstly, you will need need to be registered with and have a GitHub account as well as a JIRA account on the ZF wiki. You will need to know the email address associated with your JIRA account in order to continue. Now you need to fork the ZF2 repo in order to gain your own copy. Visit the ZF2 repo and click on 'fork'. I do love the GitHub message you get when forking a project, it makes me chuckle. Now you will need to add an RSA Public Key to your account in order to clone your fork. The advice on the GitHub Help section is fantastic and is straight to the point.
Once you've added your Public Key to GitHub, we can now get down and dirty. Just to let you know that all examples given here were done in an Ubuntu 10.04 bash terminal.
So, if not already, you need to have git installed.
ashley@laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install git-core
Once installed you can check it by doing:
ashley@laptop:~$ git --version
git version 1.7.0.4
You should see something similar.
Now we need to clone your fork of ZF2.
ashley@laptop:~$ git clone git@github.com:YOURGITUSERNAMEHERE/zf2.git
Replace 'YOURGITUSERNAMEHERE' with your actual GitHub username and execute the command.
ashley@laptop:~/Websites$ git clone git@github.com:YOURGITUSERNAMEHERE/zf2.git Initialized empty Git repository in /home/ashley/Websites/zf2/.git/ remote: Counting objects: 97601, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (15561/15561), done. remote: Total 97601 (delta 75366), reused 97601 (delta 75366) Receiving objects: 100% (97601/97601), 41.46 MiB | 10.04 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (75366/75366), done.
Once it's done that, you have your first clone of the ZF2 git repository! Congratulations!
Now we just need to configure our clone so we can keep it up to date and make sure we can push changes to our own repo. Navigate into your cloned repo directory:
ashley@laptop:~/Websites$ cd zf2
ashley@laptop:~/Websites/zf2$ git config user.email YOURJIRAACCOUNTEMAIL
We now add the actual ZF2 git repo as a remote so we can keep our current copy up-to-date.
ashley@laptop:~/Websites/zf2$ git remote add zf2 git://github.com/zendframework/zf2.git
ashley@laptop:~/Websites/zf2$ git fetch zf2
And that's it! You now have a fork of the ZF2 Git repo which you can keep up to date with the latest changes.
Keeping your copy up-to-date
ashley@laptop:~/Websites/zf2$ git checkout master
ashley@laptop:~/Websites/zf2$ git pull zf2 master
And that's it for now. Until next time..
Tags: zend, framework,, git,, github,, zf2, Comments: Be the first!