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I mentioned on my twitter account that my very first project in PHP is used in production today, and I had a few people ask me what it was. So I thought I would show some examples of it in action. While I had done other things in PHP, this was the first time I …

Marco Tabini, co-founder of php|architect and Blue Palabora, posed an interesting topic: Is PHP running out of itches to scratch? I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which PHP core is being developed has slowed down considerably over the past couple of years, while the development of many projects based on it, …

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots. Today some memories …

Over the last two and a half years, since the day I presented on Streamlined Web Development with SVN, I’ve been hearing about the Source Control Management tool called “git.” I kept reading about it online, seeing it on the schedules for conferences, and hearing it about it in the different Open Source groups here …

I ran into an extremely frustrating problems while trying to add a test script for some PHP web services. I won’t go into detail on all the different things I went through to debug this problem. But here is what it all boiled down to: Problem I have a SOAP Web Service that extends PHP’s …

I’ve been hearing, reading, and talking a lot REST, RESTful Web Services, how to implement them, and even how to explain to your wife about it. Then I see or read presentations about what is and what is not RESTful Web Services. I’ve created and consumed quite a few web services, so while I’m not …

Alright, so one of the few hangups I’ve ran into with moving from Apache to Nginx was output buffering. Now, we have a few administrative tools we use to perform large operations on our library and data. These scripts can take normally 3-5 minutes to run, and they output their progress and what step they …

A cool new trick I found with debugging pieces of code and how often they get executed. We were running into a problem where an expensive query was being called more frequently than I thought it should. This query was only found inside of a single member of a class. However, this class, which retrieves …

If you want to skip to the explanation, just read below. But before then, here is a little background. A Little Background On January 2nd, we started to run into some serious performance problems with Dating DNA, so we began the process of going and deciding what were our problems, and how to optimize them. …

Preface: This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but more of an outline on what I did. Also, I wrote this really quickly before heading off to dinner, so if there are parts that are unclear, or you have questions about, please leave a comment! This last week has been a roller coaster for us at …