Now that your application is running at peak performance and you’ve decided that it’s time to scale, let’s talk about the right setup. The modern age has brought us lots of new ways to take a growing site and scale it. From Amazon Web Services to cloud computing and grid computing, to Mosso and Akamai, [...]

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to review a number of resumes and cover letters, both through my professional endeavors and because of inadvertent posts to the DC PHP list from people replying to job postings.

In 2007 I wrote a blogging program from scratch. I was really proud of it, too. It was all my own invention, with a little help that I got from a Facebook developer I knew, and I worked really hard on it. Spent the whole summer writing it so I’d be able to launch it [...]

Much was made last week over the topic of micro optimization in PHP. Most of these argued that micro optimization was a bad idea, from the perspective of unit testing, the idea that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, the fact that it takes too much time, and that it violates the rules [...]

Much has been written about technical debt, and the way it’s both accrued and paid off. For the uninitiated, here’s the definition of technical debt: