Category: web development

All about building a website but the administrative/business stuff: that goes in “business and economics.”

MacPorts vs. HomeBrew

A friend asks whether they should use MacPorts or Homebrew.

What they are, are ways of installing Unix (Linux or BSD) software on your Macintosh in a way that they get updated. This is useful if you need to customize your (L)AMP stack, or process a document in LaTeX, or do graphing visualization or -code optimization… there are a lot of uses and having a consistent Linux-like or BSD-like tree of libraries and applications is usually the best option.

I use MacPorts and I’ve used Fink in the past. I never tried Homebrew.

Continue reading more ignorant comparisons between Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew after the jump

Posted on by tychay 20

PHP Community Conference Closing Keynote

I submitted a couple talks for [PHP Community Conference](http://phpcon.org/) last month, of which one was accepted.

Unfortunately, it was the one I hadn’t prepared at all. The title was “living without your linemen” and was supposed to be about cloud services. A bit later, they asked if I could make it the closing keynote for the conference. This allowed me to write it from scratch and actually finish the talk (which I did about 30 minutes before I had to present it).

I’m told that they’ll eventually have a video archive of the talk at [OpenEvent.tv](http://openevent.tv/), but in the meantime, I audio-recorded it and synced it to the slides on slideshare. (Apologies for the sound quality being poor, I recorded it from my Mac Book Air).

Living Without Linemen—PHP Community Conference 2011

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Continue reading about PHP Community Conference after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 1

Why Conde Nast hates me

Yesterday, Conde Nast finally caved in and is selling iPad subscriptions to the New Yorker at a reasonable price. Not only that, but [if you get the print one, you can supposedly get the digital and iPad version for free](https://w1.buysub.com/pubs/N3/NYR/IpadForm.jsp?cds_page_id=99249 “New Yorker subscription to Print + Digital Access”).

The New Yorker

I say supposedly because it doesn’t work for me. Conde Nast hates me because I’ve been a loyal subscriber for six years now.

Continue reading about Conde Nast’s first iPad subscription offering after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 18

My beef with Quora

Last year back when Quora was beta, someone pointed this Quora entry out. I explained why this guy was mistaken and let it lie. But, since a friend sent it to me recently, I guess people are actually using Quora (or something) and this deserves a response

The page being discussed is part of a larger article I wrote (and never finished) here. In the page linked, there are almost none of my opinions, but rather a summary of what was provided by Haiping during a briefing at Facebook. The outline of the page is as follows:

  • PHP has some inherent advantages as a programming language for web development.
  • PHP has some disadvantages (for Facebook). The biggest are:
    1. High CPU
    2. High Memory usage
    3. PHP components are not easy to integrate from outside
    4. Extensions writing is not the same as PHP coding
  • There were multiple attempts at Facebook to migrate from PHP but they failed: Mainly because an re-architecture team cannot keep up with the new code that is being written by the rest of Facebook—mostly writing new PHP code. The year before the presentation alone had 4 attempts at internal migrations
  • Improving the PHP core was done at Facebook and, in fact, received a lot of mileage, but this was not felt to be sustainable vs. HipHop solution.

Continue reading about my beef with Quora after the jump

Posted on by tychay 0

Largest Ruby on Rails app?

Seen in a brochure at PayPal X:

LinkedIn uses Joyent infrastructure to run the largest Ruby on Rails app with over 2 billion monthly pageviews.

  • I thought LinkedIn was Java, when did they switch to Rails?
  • 2 billion monthly? When I left my last company, our (PHP) app was doing over 7 billion monthly, and wasn’t even in the top 10 PHP applications out there. Surely there are Rails apps bigger than that.
Posted on by tychay 12

Payvment looking for API ninjas

Are you an API coding ninja? Are you enamored with e-commerce and social networks? Have you contributed to or want to contribute to open source projects? And most of all, can you bring it? If so, we want to talk to you!

Payvment, Inc, a growing San Francisco venture-backed startup, is seeking Software Engineers that want to take traditional PHP to the next level by writing best-of-breed, test-driven, object-oriented code. An ideal candidate will challenge the status quo and manage risk proactively as necessary. This position is not remote and will require a high degree of team work and initiative.

Continue reading about this jobs highlights, perks, and requirements after the jump

Posted on by tychay 3

PHP Without PHP—Automattic

Take a simple PHP trick and follow it on a huge tangent to the philosophy of good web architecture.

Presentation was given as Flash Talk at Automattic Meetup in Seaside on September 2010. Presentation originally a long form, but in the spirit of things, I have cut it down.

Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.

This is based on a PHP Advent article I wrote almost two years ago and formed a low key presentation I used to give in 2009 at conferences. I thought it’d be nice to give a more “traditional” PHP talk—but one which I felt the audience at large could relate to—at the meetup

I hope you enjoy it.

PHP Without PHP—Automattic

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Update

Posted on by tychay 1

Tales of Virality—Automattic

Presentation given as Flash Talk at Automattic Meetup in Seaside on September 2010

Presentation is given as an Ignite Talk format (20 slides x 15 seconds/slide = 5 minutes. Autopush.)

Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.

In the e-mail requesting submissions, Matt mentioned that Scott Berkun “did a very cool post and video on giving ignite talks, so I modelled this talk after that.

Sorry, I don’t have the audio file for this—I forgot to record one!. But this is the only talk that is fully scripted out and I included that with the file. 🙂

Hope you enjoy it.

Tales of Virality—Automattic

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Update:

Posted on by tychay 1

Cisco looking for PHP engineer

Kristen sent me this job posting:

Cisco has a small team that focuses on building a hosted social-networking/media platform (Cisco Eos) for media companies and the fans. They are looking for an experienced PHP developer to help lead the technology development of their advertising platform. This is a big opportunity with enormous reach and importance. The platform you help craft will be responsible for monetizing the future of content delivery — and more — for the biggest music artists, TV shows, movies and sports sites in the world. This a fun, start-up kind of mentality team with the backing of Cisco. This project is the direction that Cisco wants to move towards.

If you like to write software that scales, addresses atypical challenges, helps the world be more entertained, and is even revenue-producing, this is a dream job.

Continue reading responsibilities and requirements after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 1