My name is Michael Alexander and welcome to my blog and homepage where I keep my programming projects and general musings.

I am a Canberra, Australia based developer currently working in IT support and I spend a great deal of my time coding, hoping to move into the industry and also devote a lot of time to open source projects.

I am halfway through a Software Engineering degree at the University of New England which I am having a great time doing.

I don't specialise in any particular languages, and will always be keen to try a different language or framework/API whenever I start something new. I firmly believe that there is no language that is universally suitable for all given tasks, and the development language should be selected on its merits on a per project basis.

Beefsack.com in particular has been a project for me to dabble in the Zend Framework, which I am finding very flexible and quite powerful. Beefsack.com is an ongoing project for me and as long as the Zend Framework is under development, so will this site. Beefsack.com makes use of a wide range of the Zend packages, including:

• Zend_Db, Zend_Controller and Zend_View for MVC structure
• Zend_Navigation for breadcrumbs and menus
• Zend_Form for forms
• Zend_Dojo with Dijits for dynamic forms and content
• Zend_Layout for templating
• Zend_Config for configuration, using both .xml and PHP arrays
• Zend_Auth for authentication, using Open ID
• Zend_ACL for authorisation

I am a firm believer in free software and open source software in general. I spend most of my time in Ubuntu Linux and enjoy coding in Eclipse. Given the choice, I will always try to make everything I write cross platform.