Жизнь, технология, и прочие хорошие дела
I was excited to find out yesterday that my good friend Jon Tan has joined some more of my good friends at OmniTI as their new Creative Director. I met Jon at OSCON in Portland this year and he’s a fantastic fellow — great designer with an eye for typography, tech guru, fine cocktail connoiseur and a very funny man indeed. He’ll fit right into the awesome motley crew at OmniTI. Congrats, Jon!
I wrote a short article for PHP Advent site, which is run by my good friend Chris Shiflett. The article is a reworked version of my This is not “American Idol” blog post.
PHP Advent was born last year and its format echoes traditional advent calendars. Each day in December an article written by someone in the PHP community is posted to the site. The topics range from technical to philosophical, and the content is excellent. The second year of PHP Advent has brought us some great posts from the likes of Marco Tabini, Paul Jones, and Ed Finkler. I didn’t have time to contibute one last year, but I’m glad I made myself sit down over the rainy weekend and write one for this December.
I only wish the site allowed comments. Go ahead and leave them on this post, if you’d like.
All things come to an end, and so does my free, unemployed, wake-up-at-11-if-you-wish bum time. I’m happy to say that come Monday morning I’ll be starting at Digg as their Open Source Fellow. This is an exciting opportunity which will let me dedicate more time to PHP and other open source software, not to mention helping shore up my dwindling savings account.
Digg has a heavy investment in the open source stack and a bunch of really smart people working on it. I’m looking forward to joining the team and sinking my teeth into some very interesting problems. Plus, a major portion of my time will be spent working on PHP itself - yes, that does mean PHP 6 will be a reality that much sooner.
And now I should go take a bike ride and enjoy my remaining leisure time…
UPDATE: This post now really has been Dugg. Oh, the irony of recursion..
I was happy to find out that PHP Québec Conference accepted 2 out of 3 proposals I submitted. I’ll be giving VIM for (PHP) Programmers and Andrei’s Regex Clinic talks. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Montreal in March including the awesome people from the PHP Québec group - Yann, Philippe, Sylvain, and others.
Yes, we can. Yes, we did. And yes, we will.
I spent last night at the Digg/CurrentTV election party, surrounded by friends, having drinks and anxiously awaiting the results of this historic election. The atmosphere was electric - you could practically feel the positive energy flowing through everyone there. A few seconds before the 8 pm poll deadline, the crowd started chanting the countdown, and when it hit and Obama’s electoral vote count jumped to 297… the place went crazy, exploding into shouts, cheers, and whoops of jubilation, and I could feel myself shedding a few tears.
Never before have I been this affected by a political event or issue. I am not yet a citizen, so I cannot vote, but I am proud that people who can finally made the right choice by electing Barack Obama, the first African-American to be the President of the United States. This is a man of extraordinary moral character, intelligence, and judgement, who overcame racial prejudice, claims of inexperience, outlandish rumors and many other obstacles in this long campaign. He is an agent of change, and this is precisely what this country and its people need in these trying times.
The only thing that marred an otherwise joyful evening was the news that California Proposition 8 passed. It’s terrible that such bigotry and prejudice is still out there. The fight against it must continue. Yes, we can.
Recently I signed up for Raptr, partly because my friend Kevin works there and partly because I was getting back into gaming. In a basic sense, Raptr is a social service for people to keep track of what games their friends are playing. Of course, you can do it via Xbox Live already, but you have to be logged in to see who’s online and it covers only one platform. Raptr fixes it by providing a unified view over your multiple gaming identities: Wii, Xbox Live, Steam, PS3, WoW, and others. On PC and Mac, you can install Raptr client, and it will discover what games you have installed and add them to your game library (2000+ games, including Flash ones, are supported now and more are being added all the time). The client also handles patching your games.
A couple of things that I like specifically:
I’m far from what you would call a “hardcore” gamer, but I find it useful to see at one glance what games I have played on various platforms, and what my friends have been up to, and which games are popular in my circle or overall.
Give Raptr a try and tell me what you think.
All good things come to an end, and thus, November 5 will be my last day at Outspark. It’s been a wild, yet fulfilling ride over the last 17 months. When I was leaving Yahoo, I wanted a challenge and to be closer to the front lines of the business, and my wish definitely came true. Yes, there have been emergencies, frustrations, downtime, and a few crazily surreal moments in the true start-up fashion. But I’m very proud of what I helped build - a virtual playground for online gamers, a destination, a community, and the company that is the leader in its field. I met a lot of great people there and made good friends and I will definitely stay in touch with all of them. Outspark has a bright and interesting future.
As for me personally, it was simply time to move on. I wanted to take some time off to chill, travel, invest some effort into personal development, and reassess my future plans. My last day almost coincides with my birthday, and it feels like a good date to start this new chapter in my life.
P.S. As you noticed, the look and structure of this site has changed. If you can’t find some page you were looking for, please let me know.
Another year, another great OSCON event. The slides for my intl me this, intl me that talk are now available online via Talks page.
This past Tuesday I was a co-presenter at GeekSessions, an event that brings together speakers on a particular topic and the audience interested in it, or, as their site says, “a place with smart people and free beer.” This Geeksessions event was, of course, centered on PHP and the other speakers were Cal Henderson of Flickr, Lucas Nealan of Facebook, and Sara Golemon of Yahoo!. We each had 15 minutes, but everyone had excellent talks given the time constraints.
Thanks to Cindy and Shon Burton and Christian Perry for inviting me and for organizing the event, and to Terry Chay, for being the MC.
The slides from my 15 minute talk, all 40+ of them are on the Talks page.
I’ve just uploaded some photos taken over the New Year’s eve period. One album is from a pre-party at my friends’ place, and the other from the awesome Sea of Dreams event at the SF Concourse center. I had a lot of fun shooting both events, and a lot of it was due to my new camera acquisition - Nikon D3 - with its absolutely amazing performance in low-light situations.
I’ll have more to say on D3 in another post, but for now, check out the photos. A selection of Sea of Dreams ones can also be seen on Flickr, or even better - on Flickriver.