Zend Certified Engineer

Passing the PHP 7 Zend Certified Engineer Exam

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Last May 26, I have successfully passed the 2017-PHP Zend Certified Engineer Exam. I crammed my review in a month, but was still able to keep up my pace. You can view my profile at the Zend Yellow Pages as I am now a Zend Certified Engineer.

When I graduated in college way back in 2007, it was already one of my goals “to take” the certification. Not necessarily pass, but just to take and see for myself. Fast forward 10 years, I was not only able “to take”, but I also passed it.

The journey began when our training budget for fiscal year 2016 was allocated for the Zend Certification. I felt a bit sad because that would mean no more training/conference outside the country. My company has been very generous and proactive in keeping their engineers trained and up-to-date.

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Upgrading to PHP 7.1 on MacOS using Brew

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So today, I finally decided to upgrade my laptop to the latest PHP version as of this writing, which is 7.1.4. Now, some people were wondering why they skipped version 6.  When I went to the PHP Conference Asia 2015 in Singapore, Rasmus Lerdorf himself told us in his keynote speech that they intentionally skipped version 6 because they don’t want to have PHP 6.6.6. It’s more of a superstition rather than a business/technical decision.

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Software Developer at 31

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As my birthday approaches and as I’m nearing 31, I was reading about Software Developers on their 40s up and found this interesting article.

I witnessed how my father wrote programs when I was young. He would blankly stare at his laptop for minutes, writing things, then deleting them, repeat & rinse. I thought it was stupid. He would also tell me to “give me that <color> book with a name <title and version>” or “return this back to the 2nd shelf, 3rd from the left.” He was very particular with the order and placement of his books.

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Shirakawa-go Village by Bus

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Overnight Bus

Visiting Shirakawa-go village, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been one of my places to visit in Japan.  The village can easily be accessed when you have a JR Pass. You just need to be at JR Takayama station and from there, you can ride a bus going to Shirakawa-go village. For us though, we didn’t have a JR Pass. So what we did was we booked an overnight bus from Yokohama to Nagoya, then from Nagoya directly to Shirakawa-go village. The bus from Yokohama, which is conveniently located at Yokohama City Air Terminal (YCAT), departed at exactly 12:40am. The bus also offered free neck pillows which was really very convenient on a night bus. We arrived at Nagoya Ekimae at around 6am. The bus bound for Shirakawa-go was at 8am and is located at the Meitetsu Bus center.

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Laiban Circuit in Tanay, Rizal

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Lubo Range, Ngusong Kabayo, Tangwa Peak

Last weekend, I hiked the Laiban Circuit trail in Tanay, Rizal. In this trail course, you get to summit 3 mountains and descent 4 waterfalls. The first ascent is the Lubo Range, then Ngusong Kabayo (Horse’s muzzle), and lastly the Tangwa peak. After assaulting these peaks, you need to descent 4 waterfalls. They say that the difficulty level is 3/10. It felt like 6/10 to me.

When we started from the jump off point, the ascent was already at 45 degrees, passing by the houses of the residents. It didn’t take long when we started to see some sea of clouds.

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Strengths Finder Results

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Strengths Finder 2.0

My manager gave me a book entitled “Strengths Finder 2.0” by Tom Rath. I don’t know what it is but the first order of business is to answer some questions on the website in order to determine your Top 5 Strengths. The survey was quite long and the questions are situational and it is possible that you will agree with both statements. However , you only need to choose what’s best. In my case, I just chose the first thing that came in my mind.

Below are my Top 5 results:

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