Today I was passed a whitepaper titled "Optimizing Drupal Performance - Benchmark Results" from a joint Zend and Acquia effort. The quick summary is pretty clear and straightforward:

This paper presents the results of performance benchmarks for comparing several common PHP runtime environments and configurations. The application used for benchmarking is Drupal, the open source social publishing platform.

By now everyone in the PHP community - and most technical leads at companies who rely on PHP - should have heard about Facebook's revolutionary new open source tool, HipHop. HipHop, like PHP itself, stands the chance of being a serious game changing technology. Their stated goal was to allow their developers to continue to enjoy the speed of development that PHP gives them while improving the overall performance of their application by transforming it into C++. The resulting "transformed and compiled" application can be up to 50% faster than the native PHP application.

There have been attempts in the past to create a PHP compiler to try and improve its speed. There are two points that set HipHop apart from the pack though.

I worked on a project recently where we used Zend Framework. As part of that project, I was tasked with writing unit tests. So, I went to the "tests" directory generated for me by the zf CLI utility to get started. What I found there was three files.

The new kid on the PHP e-commerce block, Magento, has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. Earlier this year, I was entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. What you see here is the result. Comments are welcome, thanks in advance for your contribution.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit a little company in Redmond and hear about what they're doing in the PHP world, what they're doing in Open Source, and generally share some feedback.  This was my seond year being invited but my first year to attend.

The Good

First of all, the entire event was well-run and executed.  OSS Dev Strategy Lead Karri Dunn and the event manager Tanya Young both did a fantastic job of putting the whole thing together and lining up numerous great presenters and events in a great location.  The Developer and Platform Evangelists (DPE in MSese) - namely Peter Laudati, Will Coleman, and Josh Holmes - were great hosts and kept things moving.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend WordCamp NYC 2009.  Overall, it was a blast but there are some specific sessions and people I'd like to point out as particular stand outs.

First, Raphael Mudge - a local DCian - talked about his tool After the Deadline.  It's a plugin that ties into TinyMCE to perform in-context spelling and grammar checking.  I haven't had a chance to look at it in more than passing, but it looks impressive.  And for some reason, I ended up on his "The 10 People you Meet" post.  It's probably because I asked him to speak at DCPHP next month.

In recent weeks, I've spoken with a number of people about developers.  About hiring them, firing them, training them, promoting them, and generally everything revolving around getting or having good people for a team.  And one of the odd things that struck me is that:

Every organization defines "Senior Developer" completely different and sometimes contradictory ways.

I don't mean little things like one organization wants a senior have have 6+ years versus another wanting 8+ years.  I mean real philosophical differences in roles, responsibilities, background, and everything else.  So in the interest of disclosure, here are my thoughts on what makes a Senior Developer:

We've been keeping it pretty quiet so far, but with this latest announcement, it's time to start talking:

At present, I am leading up the interoperability & cross-platform efforts within web2project.

While this doesn't seem like much to many of our users - after all, we support Apache and Mysql very well - it fits with our vision of the system.  We want web2project to be the sort of tool where any organization can deploy it to start getting their project management operations straightened out.  Regardless, this announcement is not the point of this post.

Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

This post is the fourteenth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the site management features. Several of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.

CodeWorks 2009 is over.

Before I go any further, you have to understand the undertaking here...

By comparison, imagine your last major project launch. In the last few days, there are always those last few tweaks, those last few problems, those brief moments of panic... which turn into a sense of calm and relief afterwards.

Well, CodeWorks was a little different. Instead of that sense of calm and relief afterwards, we packed and headed to the next city to do it all again: Seven times in 14 days. Luckily, I only did the first three cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Dallas) as staff and was in DC as an attendee.

The Good