I can still remember meeting Yaniv Golan for the first time (nearly 8 months ago) during the ‘PHP Jump Start’ free lecture I gave in Ness College (Tel-Aviv). It was mainly an introductory lecture about PHP and about the ‘PHP Web Applications Development’ course I deliver.
I can still recall Yaniv‘s question at that meeting: ‘Will I be able, by the end of this course, to develop Joomla plugins?’. I answered him, with a small smile, that the ‘PHP Web Applications Development’ course targets far beyond developing one plugin or another. Recently, Yaniv has proven his high capabilities by developinbg the Pogg.me, a sophisticated web application, connected with a numerous web services, that presents the most popular images allocated on the web.
The ‘PHP Web Applications Development’ course I deliver focuses on providing with the required knowledge, understanding, skills and the learning capabilities required to move forward in our field. The topics listed in its syllabus reflect the fundamental topics ZCE covers, and these are the most important topics that set up the PHP fundamental professional knowledge base.
The course started and Yaniv followed my advice to keep on with his self study concurrently with the course official meetings. Self studying is the key for success. Students should make an effort and self study all topics a course covers concurrently with the course itself and never stop their progress. Learning software development is an endless process. Yaniv kept on with his progress and followed my advice to make an effort and develop a practical sophisticated project. Yaniv chose to develop Pogg.me, a web application that retrieves images data from other web sites and index them in accordance with their popularity.
Yaniv is an example others should follow. Having a seriouce approach to learning software development he kept on with his progress and reached the professionalism that caused more than a few software development companies to offer him joining their development teams.
Tomorrow Yaniv starts his first day in his new working place. Yaniv, I wish you good luck! Your attitude and your seriouce approach is an example for many other students to follow!
According to Yaniv, Pogg.me web application is hosted on amazon’s cloud and is composed of three different components: Collector (responsible for connecting with Twitter server side, grabbing and parsing the data and update the database), Calculator (responsible for querying the database, calculating the overall rating for given period, and store it all to the memecache) and the Display Layer (responsible for grabbing the data from the memecache (or database in case of a cache failure) and send it back to the browser).
