Grep My Mind Wonder what’s on my mind? Now you know.

Terry Chay will be returning to speak again!  Due to popular demand Terry has agreed to give his recent “Making frameworks suck less” talk that he gave to the ZendCon08 UnCon this year. Be sure to wear comfortable shoes ’cause Terry will pack the room!

RSVP here: http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/

The blurb from ZendCon08:
Terry Chay, the original PHP Terrorist, is well known for his criticism and ridicule of the Ruby on Rails framework. He criticizes, mocks, and f-bombs his enemies into surrender. In this discussion, Terry will share his ideas and thoughts on making frameworks better.

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room. Please RSVP if you are attending so that I can prepare enough snacks and beverages.

Look forward to seeing you there!

This event can be found at:
http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39294579201
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1195581/

Posted under Events, Internet, PHP, Technology, Web Development

Last Thursday’s SF PHP Meetup had a pretty good turnout; about 70 people by my count.  Joe Stump from Digg.com gave his talk titled “Deploying code with PEAR” to the group.  Thanks to Ray and Roger from zynga.com who contributed pizza & sodas for an opportunity to tell the developers about the job opportunities at zynga.  Digg.com & GameSpot.com are both hiring (Digg and GameSpot) as well.  Mariano Peterson and I both took pictures and posted them on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marianopeterson/sets/72157606611446280/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaeltougeron/sets/72157606635039807/ respectively.

I already have next month’s talk/speaker lined up.  Aaron Newton from Iminta.com (formerly CNET) will be giving us a preview of his Mootools talk titled “Mootools: An Overview” that he has planned for the upcoming AJAX Experience conference.  Aaron has a Mootools book coming out that’s available now via pre-order on Amazon.

Posted under Events, JavaScript, Technology, Web Development

Kudos to Mariano for taking the lead while I’m out on paternity leave (I’m going to write about that ones of these days) and setting up July’s PHP Meetup.  Thanks to an introduction from Terry, Mariano asked Andrei Zmievski to talk about the unicode updates to PHP 6.  Due to the 4th of July, we’ve moved the meetup from it’s normal date/time to Thursday July 10th @ 7pm.  It is still at CNET like usual (thanks to GameSpot.com funding the meetup).

Title: PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Description:
PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

When: Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7pm
Where: CNET Networks: 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA  94518

You can RSVP on the SF PHP Meetup’s site or just show up.  I always like it when people RSVP so that I know how much food to buy.  But it isn’t a prereq or anything.

EDIT: I just saw that Terry mentioned PB&J and I like the idea.  So PB&J it is; plus the usual chips, sodas, candy, etc. of course. 

Posted under Events, PHP, Technology, Web Development

A shameless plug for CNET… We’re hiring a few Senior Software Engineers for GameSpot.com, TV.com and Chow.com. Yes, that’s a Sr SE positions for each of those sites. We’re raising the bar and looking to bring on some powerful coders to expand the functionality of our sites. Here’s a brief list of the job skill requirements:

Must Have:

• Expert PHP skills, bonus for RoR
• 5-7 years of real world experience engineering web solutions for LAMP stacks
• Strong relational DB knowledge (table optimization, query optimization)
• Ability to prioritize and lead multiple simultaneous projects effectively
• Excellent understanding of OO software engineering concepts
• Ability to arhitect solid, scalable, extensible solutions for SE needs
• Excited by working on high-level design and architecture
• Comfortable mentoring junior engineers
• Expereince with formal release processes
• Strong verbal, written, analytical and communication skills

Bonus for:

• Admin experience with MySQL, Apache, SVN
• Background developing in a more structured language (C, C++, Java, etc)
• At least 3 years experience in high-traffic/high-availability web sites
• Strong UI experience with javaScript and AJAX using mootools or other JS Frameworks
• Experience with following technologies: Memcached, Smarty, SOLR, Lucene, Zend Framework

If you think you have what it takes, head over to our Jobs site and apply: https://careers.cnetnetworks.com/joblist.html

If you want to discuss the job in more detail first, please don’t hesitate to send me an
at michael[
]tougeron[
]cnet[
]com.

Posted under PHP, Web Development, memcached, mysql

MySQL Proxy is one of the new products that MySQL released this year that has some real promise. In the MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle session Jan Kneschke went over the existing and planned features of the proxy.

MySQL Proxy has a c-based event driven core that has command line support, event handling and a Lua-based scripting layer. The proxy is loading into MySQL via the plugin interface. With the community edition, you are responsible for writing your own scripts. But with MySQL Enterprise, it will come with several pre-built scripts that add some enhanced functionality.

The most basic use of MySQL Proxy is to rewrite or alter your queries. If you have a costly query that is killing your db, but you’re not sure where it is coming from, you can write a Lua script to either reject the query or to alter it and make it more manageable. It stops the dba from having to wait for a developer to update code and/or deploy the fix.

Another trick you can do with MySQL Proxy is to create new SQL commands. While this is probably not going to be a great idea, you can see a few interesting examples at http://thenoyes.com/littlenoise/?p=63. It is a good way to expand on functionality at the lowest level. Or to lose/forget where you put it when you switch to another db.
Read More…

Posted under Events, mysql