Oracle's PHP Developer of the year 2005

You may remember that Oracle Magazine were asking for nominations to honour people that have worked in some Oracle-related facility over the past year. Someone nominated me for the "PHP Developer of the year" category, and I "won" the award.

I'm normally a bit sceptical of awards because they're somewhat arbitrary and tend to be rather intangible, however, Oracle Magazine have gone the whole nine yards to counter that intangibility aspect; I received this weighty chunk of glass as the physical manifestation of the award:

I suspect that I won the award as a result of my efforts in developing PDO, the PDO OCI driver and my role in the redesign of the oci8 extension. Antony Dovgal has put in a similar amount of effort (perhaps even more) in his work on Oracle support in PHP. As far as I'm concerned, Tony, both our names are on the award :)

If you're really interested, you can read the blurb from the magazine here; paraphrasing-for-print has slightly twisted my words, but it's more or less what I said.

Some observations about that chunk of glass:

• it's difficult to photograph
• it's invisible on my white mantelpiece
• it's waaay too easy to get finger and palm prints all over it