Developers and Entropy
This is a selfish blog post. I read a great blog post titled "Why You Need To Hire Great Developers" but I could not find it in my browser history or chat history. It talks about entropy creators vers...
Living in the Prove It Culture
Engineering cultures differ from shop to shop. I have been in the same culture for 13 years so I am not an expert on what all the different types are. Before that I was living in Dilbert world. The cu...
Engineers Work In Their Sleep
My grandmother worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center. She worked with a lot of engineers. I have always remembered when she told my cousin and I that we should be engineers. Her reasoning was tha...
PHP Appalachia Corrections
Just got home finally from PHP Appalachia. I enjoyed meeting all the great people. I presented about what I learned and how we deal with importing large amounts of CSV data into MySQL. I ...
Deploying Scalable Websites with Memcached
I spoke at the MySQL Conference and Expo this year about the architecture we have here at dealnews.com. After my talk, Jimmy Guerrero of Sun/MySQL invited me to give a webinar on how dealnews uses m...
strtotime() - The PHP, date swiss army knife
Man, what did I do before strtotime(). Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps. And I still could not do really cool stuff. Like tonight I n...
Caching and TTL behavior
So, I am working on MemProxy some. Mainly, I am trying to implement more of the Cache-Control header's many options. The one that has me a bit perplexed s-maxage. Particularly when combined with...
Velocity Conference Roundup
As I said before, I was invited to be on a panel at Velocity Conference. I was delighted to go. I had never been to San Francisco. I have been to Portland and Santa Clara several times. The pa...
Did you know I am going to be at Velocity?
Well, neither did I until today. HA! Velocity is a new O'Reilly conference dedicated to "Optimizing Web Performance and Scalability". It starts next Monday. Yesterday I was contacted by Adam Jaco...
An Introduction to MySQL - Birmingham, AL
I am giving a talk titled "An Introduction to MySQL" here in Birmingham, AL on June 21, 2008 at 3PM. I love living in Alabama. I was born and raised in Huntsville. However, Birmingham has always ...