Ten months ago when I started at Mozilla, I began transitioning away from PHP and into Python and Django. This was inevitable: the Mozilla Webdev team favors Python over PHP in almost every webapp (Socorro is the critical exception). However, over time I had become disillusioned with the direction that PHP was taking. The project [...]

Last week, I began working on something that didn’t pan out. For whatever reason, I went down the wrong path, and ultimately abandoned the task I was working on. In discussing it with my boss, he mentioned to me that it was better to realize early on that something wouldn’t work than to trudge onward, [...]

Anyone who knows me knows that when I talk about the model, I’m usually talking about Propel. I’ve liked Propel ever since I started working with it in the middle of last year; I personally find it easier and more fun to use than Doctrine or other ORMs available today. I was excited to see [...]

There’s been lots and lots of discussion regarding the Facebook “Hyper PHP” release of HipHop for PHP. This new technology is an in-production converter for PHP that takes PHP code, converts it into C++ code, and creates a complete binary that can be run on a server natively. Facebook claims improvements of up to 50%, [...]

This morning, I was reviewing the weekly list of topics with the most comments throughout the PHP manual, and I stumbled upon the following code in the documentation for the date() function. This code is designed to tell you the day of the week for any valid date you give it: