OmniSpear Welcomes Ryan Harris!

Ryan Portfolio ShowWe are happily expanding the team here at OmniSpear and proudly welcome our newest member, Ryan Harris.  Ryan is a recent graduate from the School of Advertising Art and has been interning with us over the Spring.  He will soon be joining the company as our official employee this summer, and we are eager for him to get started.  Ryan will come as an addition to our art-minded (and techie) crew at the office, specializing on the front-end of web presence.  Our team had a chance to attend the SAA Portfolio show this past Friday to cheer on Ryan as he debuted his portfolio and final projects for graduation.  We are so proud of the work he created and know he will bring that same creativity to our clients.  Welcome Ryan!

OmniSpear Has Upgraded!  Come See Our New Office Space.

OmniSpear, Inc. Has Upgraded!  Come See Our New Office Space.

We’ve outgrown our old office space and have made a move up the the 2nd floor.  By designing a new office layout from scratch, we have been given the opportunity to more than double our existing space while also giving ourselves room for continued growth.

Some highlights of our new digs include an additional huddle room and lounge area for formal / informal meetings as well as a break room complete with bar and table seating.

Our new space is more inviting and allows more room for departments to grow, as well as harness our internal communication more effectively. Our development team is no longer crowded together, but has a creative seating arrangement that allows for both group and individual work.  Our IT support team has a quieter space that provides them privacy for even better phone support and hardware work-space. The entire development team now has stand up / sit down desks as well, which has done wonders in helping keep them more refreshed and ready for action.

Come see our new office and we’ll give you a tour!

Lobby

 

developer2 developer1 conference_room

 

OmniSpear Supports the Dayton PHP Meetup Group

The PHP programing language has been part of web development for over two decades and has been a foundation for web development as other programing languages appear then fade away. You will find PHP is the heart of many popular applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and SugarCRM. With the release of PHP 7 and it’s extreme performance increases we find PHP’s popularity on the rise again. Helping PHP’s renewed popularity is support from the Laraval framework. Laraval is “the PHP framework for web artisans”.

This is why OmniSpear has a strong PHP development team – we know the power of PHP, wether it’s customizing WordPress or creating data pipelines for line-of-business applications.

Dayton PHP Meetup Group

With our expertise in PHP it makes sense that we would support the PHP industry. So, when Brian Retterer approached us about a new Dayton PHP Meetup group it was a natural fit for us to host their meetings.

On May 17th we hosted the first Dayton PHP meeting here at OmniSpear.
DaytonPHP
And what a great start it was!
We had seven people in the meeting. Our guest speaker was Emily Stamey and she joined us via Google Hangouts. Emily shared her experience on working with North Carolina State University to “bootstrap” their legacy CodeIgniter project.

Emily started the meeting by clarifying some terminology like “legacy software”, “spaghetti code”, “lasagna code” and “refactoring”. She then talked about the scholarship application and requirements they needed to comply to as the engaged the project. She emphasized the importance of surveying the application by studying the codebase and reviewing new feature requests then get user feedback.

Emily talked about gaining user trust and always be honest with users about errors in the application. She covered setting expectations with the client, setting priority and scope of work.

Diving In

After covering all the planning topics, it was time to dive into the work. Emily started with importance of adding version control for their source code and end the bad behavior of developing in the production environment.

Emily showed showed us the various software tool packages they used for testing their code, adding templates for front-end content, mitigating vulnerabilities and database management.

Emily closed the presentation by summarizing what was learned and answered several questions from the group.

Looking Forward

Brian Retterer has ambitious plans for the Dayton PHP group. For our next meeting he will be walking through a complete Laravel build, from start to finish. He plans to have “deep dive” workshops, training for real-world scenarios and industry leading guest speakers.

Are you ready to learn more or get more out of PHP? If so join us for our next meeting here at OmniSpear.
You will find more detail on upcoming content and date on the Dayton PHP Meetup page.