tech ramblings

I have some news.  I’ll be staying on at OmniTI on site in Maryland, and taking on the role of Director of Web Development, which involves working across all OmniTI’s web related projects.  I’m really excited about this new role, and I’d like to thank George and Theo for giving me this opportunity.

This is coming up again.  I’ll be giving two talks: a tutorial with Luke Welling called "Building an asynchronous multiuser web app for fun … and maybe profit" which is a PHP/Web 2.0  tutorial, and a talk on Writing Maintainable PHP, which is a personal bugbear of mine.

The final grid is yet to be made public, but I can tell you (being on the program committee) that there are some awesome new developments in the PHP track.  Watch this space for details.

So, sometimes working here is like working at an author collective.  The people I work with are really enjoyably smart and verbal, which makes it a great place to work.    There is of course George Schlossnagle’s awesome book, Advanced PHP.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  However today I want to draw your attention to two of my other co-workers’ magnum opuses (or is that opii?).

Amy Hoy is writing a couple different books for a couple different places on Rails and JavaScript.  To give you a sample of the cool stuff you can expect, you can read her great new article on Help Vampires.  If you read any software related mailing lists you will know this story. 

Theo Schlossnagle has been writing his book on Scalable Internet Architecture[s] for a good time now,  but apparently it’s almost finished, and you can read part of it online.  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.  Guess you can’t rush a good thing.

And yes, Mark, I promise to do some work on my own book this weekend. 

…for putting my book on your recommended PHP reading list.  I am fortunate to appear in privileged company with a number of good friends - my boss George Schlossnagle, Chris Shiflett, David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, and Dan Scott.

I only found out about it through Slashdot.  Thanks guys. 

I crawled out from under my rock, since we finished work on the new version of Ecelerity.  There have been late nights and plenty of hard work, but it’s a great crew to work with.

My co-worker Amy Hoy has an especially amusing graph in her blog describing life in the land of cross browser hell.  The "confluence event" occurred rather recently.

Oracle today announced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB.  This follows their purchase of Innobase Oy, makers of InnoDB, last year.  It is rumoured that JBoss and Zend are next in their sights.  Along with their launch of Oracle Express Edition, this must be interesting news for the guys over at MySQL AB, which uses InnoDB and BDB as its two transactional engines.

OSCON is the best conference in the FOSS sphere.  It’s great fun and I always walk away having learned a HUGE amount.  It’s also a great place to meet and talk with lots of really smart geeks, which is something I would always recommend.

Please send in your talk proposals.  I am working on the PHP track.  This year, there are some more general tracks - Web Apps, Programming, and Security.  These are great for those talks that cross borders.

Go here to submit your talk:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/create/e_sess/

Don’t be afraid to submit a talk: there’s always room for people who haven’t given a talk before who are passionate about Open Source.

At last…. Luke, my partner in crime, has a blog.

I have arrived in the US to work on site at OmniTI.  More when the jetlag fades

Long time no post.  I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work. 

On that note, if anybody is aware of an implementation of the Compositor (not Composite) pattern in PHP, let me know.  Today is the first time I ever wished for Java in my PHP career.  Don’t worry, it didn’t last long.  ;)  I am making a widgetized web app and need a way to automate widget layout.  Sometimes you can out-clever yourself.