Articles on Justin Carmony

Making a Distributed Workforce Work

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:30:16 +0000

I’ve been mulling over this blog post in my mind for quite awhile. I’ve been working exclusively for distributed companies since 2008. Also know as telecommuting and virtual workforce, it basically is when you have employees working for you regardless of location. Whether it is home, a co-working space, or another office space they prefer, its when an employee can work for a company other then the office.

I’ve met and talked with several companies that have had a great success with this approach. Toni Schneider, CEO at Automattic, has written about the 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.

MySQL, Redis, and a Billion Rows - A Love Story

Mon, 23 May 2011 15:20:35 +0000

This last week we pushed live a very large architecture change for Dating DNA. For those who know me, and have heard me talk about the Dating DNA Scoring System, they know how big of a problem we faced. For those who don’t know, let me give some background:

The Problem

With Dating DNA, our goal was to display a compatibility score with every other user. This score is generated by taking two sets of answers to our 20 page survey, and running it through our algorithm. While it is super convenient for our users, this poses a problem. We wanted not only for people to be able to visit a profile and see a score, which is easy to generate a score on demand. We wanted our users to be able to browse other profiles sorted by their score with them. This requires us to pre-generate and store these scores, and then later query them.

Using GIT with SVN

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:50:10 +0000

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 in Utah. I have been a big time Subversion (SVN) user for several years now, and it has solved my problems

RESTful Web Services & Nirvana

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:21:10 +0000

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 a leading expert in the field, I have a lot of experience with them. So instead of explaining over and over again to different people my thoughts on the subject, I’m writing about them. For those who have a short attention span, I’ll sum up my feelings of the subject in one sentence for you, and then explain in detail for those interested.

Creating Chatroom / Walls with Redis & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:15:16 +0000

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 Dating DNA. We had an excellent holiday season, but with mass volume of new sign ups our servers started to slow down. Severely. Something you never want to have happen. So over this last week I’ve worked about 80 hours (though I’m a salary employee, woohoo… :P) and implemented a lot of new performance boots, and I have about four or five blog posts worth of discoveries I need to write. So before I forget them, I’m going to write them.

SVN Switch - Key to Success In Web Development

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:13:05 +0000

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

The Cloud to Bare Metal

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:02:22 +0000

A Little Background

It was the summer of 2008 when I attended the LT Pact conference that I first drank the “Cloud Kool-Aid.” As you can see from my notes, I was pretty excited about this whole concept. Excited enough, one client of mine signed up for Layered Tech’s grid layer (which is what they were demoing at the conference).

One interesting thing I heard at the LT Pact conference was one of their keynotes was as IT Researcher for Gartner. He outlined what phases the current industry would go through with “cloud computing”:

PHP HipHop – What It Means

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:32:04 +0000

There has been a lot of speculation about PHP, Facebook, and a big announcement. Over the last few weeks, several predominate PHP community members were invited to the Facebook offices to check something out. Facebook asked the PHP members, as Ben Ramsey put it, to “make a gentleman’s agreement that I wouldn’t talk until FB is ready.”

Well, Facebook has made their announcement, and it is called HipHop. Here is an excerpt:

Google Apps Dropping IE 6

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:16:59 +0000

This morning I found this email in my inbox. I use Google Apps to host my email and calendars, which works really slick and is fabulous. Here is the email:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

My PHP User Group Experience

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:46:09 +0000

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile now, but never got around to it. I woke up and couldn’t sleep only 1 hour before heading out for some Black Friday madness. Might as well make some use of me being awake.

I will have to say that belonging to a local PHP user group has been an awesome experience. A little over a year ago I somehow stumbled upon the Utah PHP Usergroup, ran by a now good friend Victor Villa. I had no idea other people were meeting on a monthly basis to talk about PHP and web development stuff. I joined their IRC channel on freenode, and I instantly found a great little resource for myself. Within two months of regularly using the IRC channel, I decided to drive the hour down to where the meetings are held. I now go almost every month whenever possible. I miss now and then due to family functions and such, but for the most part I make the trek down from Ogden to Murray to enjoy the meetings. There are a few things that I found local user groups (LUGs) can provide others that I’d like to share.

Writing Effictive PHP Caches with Memcached

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:52:15 +0000

**** Update: I gave a presentation at the Utah PHP Usergroup about memcached that went really well. Here are the slides I used:*

Effectice Caching w/ PHP + Caching http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=memcachedandphppresentation-090821151850-phpapp02&stripped_title=effectice-caching-w-php-caching

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

Delayed, yet again, at the airport. Time to get this article written once and for all.

This is a rough draft, I still need to go through and proof read this article. However, several friends were anxious to read it, so here it is rough for now. :P

Aptana Studio – PHP IDE Alternative to PDT, Zend Studio

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:09:53 +0000

The other day I ran into another option as an IDE for PHP. If you’ve been following my blog, I’ve been a big user of Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) and Zend Studio (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/). There is a third one to add to the list, Aptana Studio. It is built on-top of the Eclipse framework, like PDT and Zend Studio. It has several extensions: Python, Rails, PHP, and others. If you’ve read my post on Consumer Linux, I talk a lot about “Power & Polish.” Here is my definition:

Characteristics of Good PHP Code

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:20:02 +0000

At the time I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a very delayed layover flight to San Diego. Wonderful weather causing all sorts of headaches. So I’ve decided to make the best of my time by writing the introductory article to a series of PHP articles. I’ve had this idea for a while, and now I’m going to finally sit down and write it.

A Different Type of Article

CSS – I’m 100% Converted

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:01:35 +0000

It has been a hard, long road. But these last few days, I’ve finally have reached a realization of a great step in my life as a web design: I’m 100% converted to CSS layouts, and have forsaken tables. 5 years ago I would have believed that would be impossible, and that I would love and use tables for my layouts until the day I die. I remember hearing the lectures and heated discussions on using CSS instead, but I couldn’t bring myself to using CSS for layouts. Don’t get me wrong, using CSS was amazing for formatting and styling, such a color, size, bolding, etc. I love it every second and my conversion to CSS for those scenarios was very quick. However, the positioning of content, headers, footers, side menus and navigation was a nightmare for me at first. I just didn’t get it.

PHP Singletons, Sub-Classing, and HAS-A Relationships

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:37:53 +0000

I’ve been very busy these last fews weeks and have neglected making any posts. While there are a variety of subjects I’d love to post about, they’ll most likely have to wait until the next year. However, I thought I might be able to throw up a quick example of how to use PHP Singletons and extending public classes.

The Singleton Pattern “is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object.” (Wikipedia) In PHP, a singleton is created by making the constructor protected or private. “How do you create an object then?” Its done in two parts. First, you make a static class variable that is private, to hold the instance. Second, create a static function to return the instance. Here is an example:

CSS – ID vs Class

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:22:20 +0000

After hacking apart & cleaning up code for the better part of the day, I’ve decided to set the record straight about CSS, IDs, and Classes. The question is “when should I use an ID, and when should I use a class?” Is it that big of a deal?

The big issue is that people who just write Cascading Style Sheets usually won’t run into problems if they are more lax with their use of IDs. Its the people after who coming in trying to add advanced JavaScript features that will end up becoming very, very frustrated.

Zend Studio vs PHP Development Tools

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:41:44 +0000

I’ve been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I’ve been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

MySQL & PHP – SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS – An easy way to get the total number of rows regardless of LIMIT

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:30:48 +0000

Here is a little trick I found awhile back. I faced a challenge several months ago where I had to query a large, complex data result from MySQL. I “paged” through the results using LIMIT and OFFSET. However, I wanted to know the total number of rows w/o the LIMIT. The previous coder accomplished this by a query before appending the LIMIT statement at the end. This turned out to be very inefficient due to MySQL put together the 10000+ rows and sent it to PHP ready to be parsed, only to have the function mysql_num_rows() to be executed on it.

Zend Studio – Basic Intellisense Tutorial

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:51:13 +0000

I thought I would throw together a little video on how make the most out of Zend Studio’s intellisense using PHP Doc Blocks.

[A Flash demo stood here. It is no longer viewable.]

Full Resolution Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?wmzqmyelmox

Thunderbird Email Client: A Guide for Outlook Lovers (Part 1)

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:04:31 +0000

Overview

I’ve been using Thunderbird over the last year or so, and especially with version 2.0 I think it is a great client. In my opinion, it is the only decent email client that can compete with the easy of use of Outlook, yet totally dominate Outlook when coming to not being a bloated pig. I’m sorry, but when I run 4 IMAP accounts, and I have a PC with 4 gigs of RAM and a quad core processor, and Outlook is so slow and takes minutes to become responsive, it is just bad.