Day 3: Løkken and Hjørring

The next day we drove to the seaside town of Løkken, famous for its candy store and beaches. We arrived early in the afternoon and parked at a big parking lot, for beachgoers. First up; the beach of course.

This beach is also famous for its World War II bunkers part of the Atlantic Wall and we could see them in the distance. But first a little walk on the beach and visiting the pier, where the water was frantically splashing over. Something I wanted to get on camera — would have been better if I had cleaned the salt seawater afterwards.

Our road trip to Scandinavia

I've been wanting to visit Scandinavia for quite a while, I've been to many European countries (Great-Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Austria) but never to one of the nordic ones.

At a previous internship 2 co-workers of mine have been there and they were absolutely loving it, especially Norway. If you asked me in february where I'd go, I would have probably said the Garda lake in Italy. But since June all plans had changed to Norway.

Yesterday I went to the open day at ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This is the ESA (European Space Agency) facility that houses most of the technology research and project development. I'm not even sure what it was anymore, but they have some rooms and utilties over there that even make NASA jealous!

However.. I wasn't just at the open day, I was actually invited for the #SocialSpace event hosted by @social4space together with these tweeps. Mostly Dutch people, but also some from Belgium, Germany, France and even Spain.

To put this blog post into context; this is written by a 25-year-old developer who uses the Dutch open data (https://data.overheid.nl) and doesn't like to read too much. I rather hack tutorials than read specs and I code stuff for the use of the public, i.e.: data needs to accommodate to the common people.

With that out of the way and allowing you to see this from my perspective here goes; the biggest problem(s) with Open Data.

What is PagodaBox

PagodaBox.com is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for PHP.
They have plans for Ruby and Python, but they're not here yet as of this writing.

At Pagoda you can launch components, such as; web (Apache + PHP), database (I know MySQL works for a fact), cache (Memcache or Redis), worker and cron job (beta).

I was working on a Laravel project and had to work with a Eloquent ORM object; I then needed to create an empty stdClass object.

There's a chance that a person is not known and being lazy I wanted to fill the form anyway with my Person object, so I needed a mockup of that object.

<?php
$person = (object) array_fill_keys(
    array('firstname', 'lastname', 'email', 'photo'),
    ''
);
?>

I'd say this solution is quick and dirty.. but frankly, it's not that dirty at all!