Andrei Zmievski

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.

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 am back from Atlanta. This was a pretty good conference and also my first visit to that area. There were some very interesting talks, and the closing keynote was supremely funny and inventive - great job, Sean (and Marco). A few of us ventured into the city in the evening and had the best LHB event so far.

Slides for my keynote and VIM presentation are available on the Talks page.

Ed Finkler, or funkatron, as he prefers to be known (although I’ll have to investigate this claim of “tron”ing the “funk”), put up a Guide to php|works Atlanta. He has good judgement to highlight both of my talks (your pick of a beer at the conference, Ed). Apparently, Matt Mullenweg won’t like whatever it is I have to say in my keynote, which means I can make whatever extravagant claims I want. And yes, “Vim for (PHP) Programers” should be very nerdy, yet very, very hot. Oh yes. Work it, baby. I’m almost positive someone will go into the Insert mode during the talk.

Off to Atlanta tomorrow. I hear that the ratio of single, attractive, funny and intelligent women to, well, men over there is about 9:1. ‘Nuff said.

PHP internals mailing list has been filled with massive threads lately, mostly concerning PHP 6. Nothing too surprising in the amount, topics, or quality of polemic there, but I just love it when someone pipes in with a post like this:

I don’t really know much about topic X, and to be honest, I don’t really
know much about the internal workings of php. I’m going to suggest an implementation suggestion… Keep in mind I havent
hacked around with php source, so my variable naming etc will be wrong…
and its all psuedocode, so its not

[a page of C++ snipped]

I think this would provide a very fast implementation of what is trying to
be done.

Im just making a suggestion, and feel free to ignore/criticise me if im
wrong. I don’t know anything about phps internals… Just an idea

That’s just awesome. We totally haven’t considered that before, but your brilliant, yet humble and self-deprecating idea has shined new light onto the issue. Don’t worry about PHP internals, it’s just some hackish code we had lying around.

I just have to wonder why someone would post this without bothering to research the issue at hand for at least 15 minutes. It’d be like me going to the space shuttle designers and saying, “Hey, I know I don’t have a degree in rocket engineering and it’s just an idea, but that problem with the insulation foam you’re having.. have you thought about putting some duct tape on it?”

Every message like this leads me to change my default presumptions about the cluefulness of the new posters to the list, and unfortunately, not in a better direction.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have namespaces.