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Interview With The Creator of jobberBase Filip C. Tosa

 

We have a great interview with Filip C. Tosa the creator of jobberBase, an open source job board created in PHP.

First of all thank you for the opportunity of having you here. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself ?

Thank *you* for the invitation!
My name is Filip and I love to play around the web! I’ve been doing it more seriously in the past 7 years, but I’ve never been more excited and involved than I am right now.

I also wrote a book about Ajax and PHP (“AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications”), about 2 years ago, and it was received amazingly well by most of the readers! Since then, people tend to look at me as an Ajax/JavaScript guru, but that’s not necessarily the case, as I continue my struggles with writing better JavaScript.

What is jobberBase in details and how did you come up with this idea ?

jobberBase started out as an experiment.
In July 2007 I created jobber.ro, a very-focused and good-looking IT-only job board. Actually, I had built the first version of jobber 6 months before, but lacked the time and energy to get it out there.
So jobber was a great success (also because I had low expectations and only invested time in it) and, 1 month later, I was thinking more and more to open-source the code.

I call myself an “open-source fan”, as I use a lot of open-source code and I really like the idea of openness.
So without any specific rationale except the sense that I should do this, I  cloned jobber’s code, translated it into English, fixed some bugs, found a name to release it under and threw it into the wild . I did it all in one day and thus was jobberBase born.

I like to experiment and I like to venture into the unknown, and this is exactly what jobberBase was to me.

Why open source ?

OK, so when I said I didn’t have any specific rationale I didn’t mean I didn’t have any rationale at all. But it was all kind of fuzzy, really.
I thought that it’d be good for jobber’s PR.
I thought that if people find jobberBase interesting, they’ll want to contribute with bug fixes and new features.

In the same time, I was a bit worried that I’d be helping competition and that I’d create a jobboard inflation.

Now, after 1 year, these are the results:
iterated through 7 versions (including betas);
5 other people have commit-access on the SVN trunk;
3 of those people have contributed with A LOT of new features, the rest with bugfixes;
over 21.000 downloads and 50 active websites running jobberBase, all around the world (or at least those are the ones we know about);
a flourishing community of over 400 users and developers on our forum.

All in all, going open-source was one of the smartest thing I did .

What is the technology behind jobberBase ? Do you use a framework or any
other third party script in the software ?

jobberBase is written in PHP and runs on a skeleton/framework we’ve developed during the past years. I say “we” because I don’t take credit for the entire skeleton — it was developed together with other developers I’ve worked with.

The framework itself imposes a fair degree of separation between business-logic and view-logic. It’s not pure MVC, but no spaghetti-code either. It uses Smarty as a templating engine. Smarty is open-source .

On the client-side, jobberBase uses jQuery (best JavaScript toolkit, open-source too!). I was just beginning with jQuery back then, so it may not be the most elegant jQuery code, but it works.

And because jobberBase uses jQuery, I recommended it to John Resig (jQuery’s creator) when he asked his blog-readers for a simple jobboard solution: http://jobs.jsninja.com/

Tell us a little bit about the apps you use when you’re developing.

Ah, yes. I try to use the simplest apps and avoid to get caught in software-bloat.
My machine is a 2.2GHz MacBook Pro and I love OS X! It’s the best operating system and it’s really making my every work-day a pleasure. As opposed to when I used to work on Win XP…

My editor of choice is TextMate and I’m angry on myself cause I don’t use it at its full capacity!
I prefer Safari as a browser, but the Firebug extension in Firefox is one I can’t live without. So Firefox (always the latest version) is where my work first comes out into the world .

I’m kind of lazy sometimes, so instead of compiling and fine-tuning Apache, PHP and MySQL, I use MAMP (XAMPP for Mac) and it’s perfect for the localhost environment.
However, our servers all run CentOS.

Subversion is like air to me and I can’t imagine how I survived a few years ago, without it . Unfortunately, there’s no TortoiseSVN (best Subversion client!) on Mac, so I first tried SmartSVN. It’s okeish, a bit slow (written in Java) but got the job done. Now I use Versions, a new SVN client written in Cocoa (native Mac) and I’m lovin’ it!

Cyberduck for SFTP, Terminal for a lot of stuff, Apple Mail for e-mail, VMWare to run a Windows virtual machine, Stickies to quickly write down anything.

My team and I use our own project management app that we wrote a while ago and it’s really great! We also use Google Docs for most of the documents, but some of us are trying to promote an internal wiki. I hate wikis.

As for communication, we use the project management app the most, then e-mail, IM and a lot of Skype.

What are your top 5 favourite sites ?

Tough one and I may get back to you on it. Favourite from a design point of view or from a “how often you visit it” point of view?
Anyway, the first two are easy: Google and Google Reader.

I can’t think of other favourite sites, right now. I see so many that it’s hard to keep track — that’s Google Reader’s job!

As a final question, do you have any tips for newbie web developers ?

Like “follow your dreams” and that stuff? Hmmm, let’s see…
Try to learn as much as you can and from as many people as you can. You’re never “the best” and you can never say “I know it all”. Admit this, stay humble and keep walking.

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