I’ve received some sad news. Three weeks ago, A colleague of mine, Richard Thomas, passed away of a heart attack. Those in the PHP community may have known him by his cyberlot handle or by his phpjack web site.
I worked with Richard for a year and a half. Richard liked solving problems and was always quick [...]
Richard Thomas
December 10th, 2010ZendCon: Writing Maintainable PHP Code
October 19th, 2009I’ve finally made it to my first Zendcon. Its nice to see some familiar faces and also nice to put new faces to familiar names.
I gave my maintainable PHP talk this morning. I love doing this talk. Thanks to everyone who attended. I’ve put the slides (pdf) up on my talks page.
Much [...]
Looking Towards the Cloud
May 2nd, 2009Some people love their automobiles. They can tell you all all about their technical specifications. They buy upgrades and after market parts. Its a lifestyle and a hobby. I am not one of those people. For me an automobile is purely a means to an end. I am here, [...]
Closures are coming to PHP
March 22nd, 2009Dagfinn has a post looking at using the new closure feature of PHP 5.3. He compares using foreach for iteration versus array_map. “Interesting,” he concludes, “but not necessarily better than conventional alternatives.”
I agree for that case. Consider instead, a more complicated operation that requires a setup and a tear down after.
setup();
operation();
teardown();
Now what happens [...]
php | tek Wrapup
May 26th, 2008I 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 [...]
php | tek 2008
May 20th, 2008Well, 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 [...]
Benchmarking PHP’s Magic Methods
November 4th, 2007Larry 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 [...]
The Endpoints of the Scale of Stupidity on Video
November 2nd, 2007A 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 [...]
Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
October 28th, 2007Mac 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 [...]
Keywords and Language Simplicity
October 11th, 2007Well, 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 [...]
Feed
Subscribe to this blog…