Yeah, yeah, I know it's a cliche but you do have to start somewhere. Some of you searching around on the web may have found my other blog @TheBallPark, where I talk about my experiences with my simulation baseball team. However, I decided to start up @TheKeyboard to talk about the other side of my life, where I'm a programmer who's working with PHP at his day job and learning Rails on the side.

Again, I need some time to modify this blog as I learn how Serendipity likes to do things.

So, what about my day job? Well, I work for a company called Instaclick and we do adult dating sites (no names just quite yet, you inquisitive little monkeys). I spend my days working with PHP code and MySQL databases. We started out quite small but now we're up to 18 developers, with 4 more on the way. You may think that's a lot of developers to deal with one web site, but it's a pretty massive code base of 300,000 lines of code.

Anyway, today I got some great news. Two weeks ago I had attended the php|works conference in Toronto and took the Zend PHP Certification test. It was a brutal test of 70 questions that cover EVERYTHING in PHP. In all honesty, if you work with PHP on a regular basis and study a little bit to cover the things you haven't worked much with, you should be able to pass the test. But you really need a broad knowledge of the language.

You can check out my entry on Zend's web site here