Lightning talk: File_MARC for PHP

Posted on Wed 28 February 2007 in Libraries

I gave a lightning talk at the code4lib conference today on “File_MARC for PHP” introducing the File_MARC library to anybody who hasn't already heard about it. I crammed nine slides of information into five minutes, which was hopefully enough to convince people to start using it and provide feedback on what could be improved or smoothed out... I'm looking forward to chatting with more people about it over the remaining days of the conference. I've already introduced a few people to PHP's simple tests for test-driven development, so even if nobody ends up using File_MARC, at least people are learning about some of the hidden gems in PHP.

The funny thing is that I had originally pitched a full session talk on this subject for the conference, and it didn't make the cut of the ruthless democracy that is code4lib. In retrospect, even a twenty-minute thunder talk probably would have been too much information for anybody but the most die-hard PHP and MARC coder out there; the lightning talk was a perfect format for the talk. I hope to let the documentation do most of the talking in the future.

Here are the slides from the talk in OpenOffice.org and PDF format. Enjoy!

/me notes that UnAPI would be useful here... Gotta try and submit a patch to the s9y repository...