Professional PHP Blog

I really enjoyed myself at this year’s php | tek. The conference seemed even better than last year. Here are the slides from my talks…

• Exceptional PHP
• Coding for Success: Writing Software You’ll Be Able To Understand Next Month

Here are some of the books I mentioned…

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• php|architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns
• PHP in Action: Objects, Design, Agility
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Implementation Patterns
• Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML

I’m already looking forward to next year.

Well, I’ve made it to PHP|tek in Chicago. I flew in last night, had a beer with Jason and then used the WiFi in the lobby to spin up an extra large EC2 instance (via RightScale) to do some benchmarks for one of my talks. I’m using the the XL instance because it it is not shared with other users.

I’m still putting the final touches on my slides.

• Exceptional PHP
• Coding for Success: Writing Software You’ll Be Able To Understand Next Month

I’m blogging this from Rob Richards’ Working With Web Services presentation. Oh yeah, I work with Rob. Oh yeah, since, I haven’t posted anything in six months … In January, I moved to San Francisco and started work at Mashery. I realized from talking with Jason last night that I really haven’t mentioned that here. They’ve been keeping me pretty busy, hence the lack of blogging.

php|tek is on twitter. So, I’ve finally signed up there. I don’t get it.

One last thing, Mashery is Hiring good PHP and Javascript programmers.

I am very sad. Two weeks ago, my cousin Sarah had a stroke and died. She was 35, two years younger than me.

As kids, Sarah and I, (along with her sister Rachel) would spend weeks in the summer staying at my grandparents house, playing and doing the things that ten year olds do on a farm. We sat around the campfire at family reunions. We played cards and games, talked and argued. I always looked forward to seeing all my cousins at holidays and family gatherings, but Sarah and Rachel were special then because they were closer to my age.

As adults, Sarah and I also did stuff together on occasion. We still sat around the campfire at the family reunions and visited during the holidays. But, we also went to bars and restaurants, Sarah always knew the best bars. We went to Cedar Point and shared an automobile accident. She would cut my hair and I would fix her computer. But mostly, we just talked. Sarah was just plain easy to talk to and always interesting.

In recent years Sarah moved to Atlanta to build a life for herself there. She opened a salon there and infused it with her character and personality. It was a place where she was at home and happy. I’m sure her clients felt happy and at home there as well. (A client remarks on Sarah’s passing)

But, the most important thing about her move to Atlanta was meeting her husband, Kevin there. I’ve only met Kevin a few times, but the one thing that I know about him is that he made Sarah happy.

I haven’t seen Sarah as much in the last few years. Atlanta is far from Michigan and she disliked flying. She came to fewer and fewer holiday functions. Despite her many invitations to visit Atlanta, I didn’t go.

That is until September, when I went to the php|works conference in Atlanta. One of the reasons I wanted to go to the conference was to be able to see Sarah. After the conference, I stayed with her for a couple days.

Sarah showed me her Salon and I could see how much she loved it. She introduced me to the dogs that she saved. We went out to eat and visited the local Atlanta attractions. But mostly, we talked. We talked about family, dating, kids and careers. We talked about her writing, the gym she liked, the church she had joined and the things she wanted to do.

Sarah tried very hard to convince me to move to Atlanta. I think she felt that all I needed to do was to move there and I would meet the love of my life and l could live there happily to the end of my days. After all, she did.

There is so much that I still want to do with Sarah. I feel like I’ve always taken it for granted that that she would be around for us to “do that later.” I guess not. I’ll miss Sarah.

Sarah’s obituary.

Larry Garfield has an interesting set of benchmarks covering many of PHP’s magic methods. His results correspond pretty well to my own benchmarks in the area. The thing to take away is that its not necessarily the overhead of the magic methods, but rather what you do inside them. Its hard to [...]

A quote from Cal Henderson (via simonwillison) presents a “Web Application Scale of Stupidity:”

| OGF (One Giant Function) —- Sanity —- OOP (Object Oriented Programming) |

The scale that Cal is talking about is actually better known as modularity:

| Few large modules —- Sanity? —- Many Small Modules |

If you haven’t listened to Alan Kay [...]

Mac OS X is a great development platform for working with PHP. Leopard comes with Apache, PHP and many other development tools, such as subversion already installed. Leopard brings a much needed upgrade from Tiger’s tired PHP 4 to a very modern version of PHP 5.2.4. This is a guide for setting [...]

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords. Perhaps that reflects Java’s [...]

Sometimes its the little things that make a difference. If you run the this test program in PHP 4 (tested on 4.4.7):
< ?php
function test($arg) { echo "talk like a pirate."; }
test();
?>
You get the following message:
Warning: Missing argument 1 for test() in /usr/bin/- on line 2
The error message here is reported at the position of [...]

The state of Michigan, in a bid to become the most confusing state to operate a business in, has passed a sales tax on a bizarrely random selection of services. These services include such illustrious professions as astrology services, social escort services, and graphic design services.
The enumerated list of taxable services (sec 3d) [...]

Well, I imagine that this opinion piece by Derick Silvers will cause some conversations: 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. The gist being that a big bang rewrite of an existing code base is always a risk and that Rails is optimized more for the greenfield case. [...]