I had the privileged recently of spending a few minutes on the phone with Jason Austin, one of the speakers for TEK·X. I had hoped to be able to let you listen to the conversation but as sometimes happens, the technology did not cooperate. So instead I’ll give you the transcript here for you to enjoy.

Jason, I have three questions for you. The first is, How did you get into programming and specifically, why did you choose PHP?
I got into programming when I was in high school. I started with a TI-83 calculator. I learned how to do pythagoras theorem so I could “cheat” on my math. That is really how I got started with it. On up through high school, the web was really interesting to me. I started looking at way to build things on the web. Originally I started looking at Perl and Perl was kind of annoying. I found PHP when it was in PHP 3. Before I knew it I could do all sorts of cool stuff. I made my own form processor to send email. I though it was really awesome. I’ve stuck with PHP since then and now I’m lucky enough to make it my job now. So it’s really fun

Next Question: You will be speaking at TEK·X this year, you session is titled Lean Mean PHP Machine. Can you tell us a little bit about your session?
Sure. I’ve been to quite a few conferences and attened the “HOWTO” sessions or best practices sessions. They are really focused on testing or quality control or project management, things like that. Those topics are great and all but in large shops you have lots of different people to be able to handle all those tasks. When you are a team of one or two, you have to become a jack of all trades when it comes to project management and rolling out your product. What I talk about is how to handle that with a small group of developers. How to not sacrifice quality in your application and workflow. How to take advangage of a lot of the resources that are around you so that you can have a high-quality PHP shop but you can do it by yourself if you have to.

Final question for you. I was poking around the web getting ready for this call and noticed that while your name is Jason AUSTIN, you domain name is JasonAWESOME.com. What is the story behind that?
I was ordering DirectTV one day and was on the phone with the sales guy giving him all my information. He asked me “What is your name” and I said “Jason Austin”. He said “Jason AWESOME?” I said no “A-U-S-T-I-N, like the city in Texas.” and I spelled it out for him. He said “Man that would have been a lot cooler if it was awesome.” I though it was a pretty cool idea so I made that my domain name and bought it that afternoon.

Thank you Jason for taking the time to talk to me. I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.

If you would like to hear Jason present there is still time to register. Click here, sign up and join us for TEK·X!

TEK·X is happy to announce that Nate Abele will be presenting his session, “Measuring Your Code” as part of TEK·X.

One of the biggest problems of software projects is that, while the practice of software development is commonly thought of as engineering, it is inherently a creative discipline; hence, many things about it are hard to measure. While simple yardsticks like test coverage and cyclomatic complexity are important for code quality, what other metrics can we apply to answer questions about our code? What coding conventions or development practices can we implement to make our code easier to measure? We’ll take a tour through some processes and tools you can implement to begin improving code quality in your team or organization, and see what a difference it makes to long-term project maintainability. More importantly, we’ll look at how we can move beyond today’s tools to answer higher-level questions of code quality. Can ‘good code’ be quantified?

This will be a great session and will make the decision of which session to attend during that time slot all the more difficult.

If you have not yet registered for TEK·X, make sure you do so soon! Click here to sign up and insure your seat at this great conference.

TEK·X Attendees and those still on the fence, I am very excited to announce that Kristina Chodorow will be joining our already great lineup of speakers. If you were at her webcast a few weeks ago or if you are in the MongoDB community already, you know Kristina is one of the lead programmers on MongoDB.

Kristina will be teaching a tutorial titled “Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB” and a regular session titled “MongoDB for Mobile Applications”

If you are looking to learn more about MongoDB or NoSQL in general, these are sessions you don’t want to miss.

There are still tickets for both the Tutorial Day and the Conference. Com learn and laugh with us at TEK·X, Register today.