So I went ahead and logged into my BestBuy account website. Sure enough, I only had 4,386 points worth about $87.00. Its amazing what a two digit difference can make. I wonder how many complaint phone calls BestBuy will field due to this error. I wonder which developer is to blame, and if he is going to get an ear full for this mistake. Personally, I always get very nervous when sending out mass emails. Especially when putting dollar amounts on them.

Maybe I should call up and see if I can get them to honor their email.

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Then I started to think about how people make changes in their lives. When I just focused on not drinking coke, it wasn’t easy, but totally possible. They say it takes about 21 days to form a habit. So instead of listing out a dozen goals at the beginning of the year, why not tackle a new one each month? Focus on one habit you want to create or change, spend the first 21 days creating it, and the remainder of the month keeping it. By the time the new month rolls around, your new habit is set and ready to go, and time to tackle a new habit.

One reason I believe setting one goal per month is typically one goal requires multiple changes. With giving up coke, I had to figure out what to replace it with. That means I had to keep our Brita pitcher full of water, which I had to make sure we had enough filters. When night time server emergencies occurred, or I had to drive late in the night, how could I get some caffeine?

So February I’ve made the goal to work out at least four times a week, hopefully five. That required me to get up earlier in the morning, which in turn means I had to go to bed earlier. I made sure I knew where my workout DVDs were at, that I pulled the weights out, and I had my workout clothes ready. That way, when my alarm went off, I could get up and go work out.

I can say, this week, I’ve worked out 3 days and tomorrow will make a fourth. Its not easy, but taking one habit at a time makes it totally possible. So from now on, each month, I’m going to tackle one habit. I have a theory, that the ability to make and change habits is an actual skill. Maybe down the road I’ll be able to make two, or even three habits a month. I’ll keep posting updates with how things are going.

For March, I think I’m going make it a habit to bring my lunch to work each day, which will help me eat healthier and save some money. My suggestion to anyone who wants to make some changes in their life, take it one habit at a time each month.

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Well, Facebook has made their announcement, and it is called HipHop. Here is an excerpt:

Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it’s certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Marco Tabini has a nice summary on what PHP need to know about HipHop. However, people I’ve talked to have had several opinions on HipHop, ranging from pure delight to doubts to indifference. Personally I think this is a great thing for PHP, and I’ll tell you why.

HipHop will enabled business to pick a web scripting language and use it from start-up to internet-giant. While HipHop isn’t the first tool used to speed up PHP, such as APC, Memcached, and others; it is more of a current reminder: PHP is serious about the web. For people already using PHP, this is just a nice feature. For those who aren’t using PHP, it shows that it is a very strong candidate.

I’ve worked in a non LAMP shop before. To non-PHP people, it has the stigma, regardless of actual performance, of being hard to scale. It is a “scripted language”, and in the Java / .NET world where I was working, it was looked at as being an absurd choice. Now, PHP can make a strong case of being able to mature with your application and scale appropriately.

One fear that I have as a Project Manager, and anyone has who decided on the technology that they will implement, is “picking the wrong team.” During my .NET days, Microsoft’s team announced a new technology for .NET applications. It showed a lot of promise and simplified some things that were a pain in .NET. Our team adopted the new technology and ran with it. It wasn’t perfect, but we liked it. Less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it would be moving the project to a drastically different team, which basically meant “there wasn’t enough adoption, so we’re putting this project on the back burner.” The new team was basically to maintain the code forward, but not develop new features.

What happened is we invested on this new technology, and we saw the potential it would have in the future. We lost our investment, since that future potential would never be realized. Now our projects had this new technology embedded in many spots. Re-writing those places would take a great deal of time. From a Project Manager perspective, it was a poor choice.

For PHP, the emergence of HipHop, a concept that is working across thousands of production servers, it sends a strong message to the web development community as a whole. Not only is PHP widely adopted, flexible yet powerful, and easy to implement. PHP is competitive, and is continually evolving to adapt to web developer’s needs. It is a safe bet for many projects, and it isn’t going anywhere but up.

Will I be implementing HipHop right now? Probably not. Ilia Alshanetsky has a very healthy reality check on what HipHop is for. But the bottom line is I don’t need what HipHop is offering yet. I can see very great uses in the future for Dating DNA’s compatibility generation, as well as certain pieces of other PHP projects that could use a serious performance boost. But for now, my Blog will not be HipHoping along. I’m excited for not only what HipHop does, but what it’s greater underlining meaning as a whole with PHP.

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Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

For all Web Developers around the world, we should all be rejoicing! Having a large internet giant telling its consumers to "drop IE 6" and other older browsers will make all our lives easy. I remember while working on a very large site, we used PNG images sparely for some background images. The deadline was extremely tight, but we were (barely) on schedule. Out of the blue I get an email forwarded to me from the marketing director for the client, and it went something like this:

Why are all the backgrounds looking nothing like the mock? Its all a funny blue.

Of course, the Marketing Director had IE 6. Whats worse, is that he was working for a very large computer technology business. We had to drop everything and apply ugly IE 6 hacks to enable PNG support. At the time, I tried explaining that the browser he was using was released while I was still in highschool, but he didn't understand. Hopefully now the big internet giants will start telling people "Get off IE 6." Once people adapt better browsers, the more we can do with the web.

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First, everyone does everything. Check your ego at the door. In the first startup I was with, I was in charge of adding reporting to the eCommerce application and taking the garbage out. Was it an effective use of my time? Not at all. Did it have to be done? Yes. Did we have the money to hire someone else? Nope. If your startup is renting office space, you probably won't have to worry about this... but who signs for packages? Who re-orders coffee? On the flip side, you could be the one taking technical questions at the next investor pitch or invited to the big customer Christmas party.

I thought he hit the nail on the head with the article. Over the last few years I've worked with three startups, one of which was successfully bought by a large corporation. The other two have successfully gained some good revenue, but are still in the "Looking for More Money" phase, and I continue to do work for them on a contractual basis.

My only concern was that at the end of the article, he only mentions that he is still okay with working for a startup. He didn't mention some of the biggest "perks" I consider working for a startup. So here are some of the items that, if you can handle the "draw backs", are some great things. These are not "guaranteed", as each startup is different, but typically you'll find some of these.

• Accelerated Learning - I've felt that I've learned at such a faster rate while working in a startup. In large development teams, you typically work on very specific things. Your team only works on one part of a larger project or product. However, with the startup, you typically have to do a lot more varied work. At Ambient, the company that was sold, I was a junior developer of a company of three developers. Here is the list of some of stuff I did in roughly one year:
  • Company Website
  • All Web Services
  • All Web Designs
  • Website Demos & Prototypes
  • Data Mining Services
  • Executive Dashboard
  • Sales & Inventory Reporting Website
  • Customizable Online DVD Rental System

  Not only did I work almost exclusively on these projects, they integrated with the pieces the other two developers worked on. For three developers, we cranked out a lot of great software. Since I was the junior developer, when ever we had a tech support issue that was a little too complicated for our two tech support guys, I had to diagnose and solve a lot of complicated issues. I got experience with VPNs, LDAP and Active Directory, very large databases (100,000,000+ rows), VNC & RDP, and automated deployments across thousands of remote locations, to name a few.

  If you enjoy getting your hands on a lot of different technologies, and do a lot more than in a normal company, you can really learn a lot at a startup.

• Less Politics, More Work - While I know this doesn't apply to all startups, the ones I've worked in seem to have a lot less politics than other companies. I believe its because, first of all, there are less people to have politics with. Second, there is way to much work to get done to spend time on playing politics. Everyone seems to just be focused on getting work done.
• More Input, More Direction - While working in a startup, I've found that I have a lot more say in how we do things compared to other companies. Creativity isn't just a bonus, it is a requirement. Many times you are working on an idea, not a detailed specification. Your creativity is required to make the idea fully functional and work properly. I've found many times my ideas are implemented, and while looking at the final product, I can see my influences all over the place.
• Closer Team, Fewer Annoying Co-workers - Some may think this is a myth, however what I have experienced is startups don't have time to put up with teams that don't work well together. For the exception of one guy who was really nice, but a major pain to work with, I've enjoyed working with all my co-workers and (I hope they can say the same about me). Typically people who don't enjoy the fast pace leave after a short while. If there is an employee who doesn't get along with the others, typically they will go find work elsewhere because the stress of the pace and not getting along well with others compound out of control. Even if they don't leave on their own, management will usually find some solution, because a team that doesn't work well together won't produce the needed products to make a success. Unlike a large corporation, there isn't anywhere to hide bad workers. If you're not carrying your own weight, you're gone.
• No Boredom, High Adrenaline - The pace can be stressful, but I found it most of the time exhilarating. There is never, ever a lack of work. Currently for the two startups I'm doing work for, there are years and years worth of work I can do. Sometimes the deadlines can be a killer, but meeting them is very rewarding. Its an awesome feeling when your team of two developers and one project manager create a product that out performs & demolishes competing products from large, well established companies.
• High Levels of Satisfaction - I personally feel I get more out of working for a successful startup. Since developers will produce more code and applications than in other companies, there is more to be proud of. If you're team is really tight, and a few of you create an amazing product, it is an amazing feeling.

So while startups are not for everyone, and they have their drawbacks, I believe certain types of developers can find rewarding work in them. I know I've been lucky to work on some excellent products, and I haven't had an experience (yet) where I've gotten burned. Maybe the things I've mentioned aren't as common as I think, but I truly believe startups offer opportunities for developers to really accelerate their learning and excel at rewards jobs.

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Greets all,

Being in my seat, I've heard from many people over the course of this past
year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many
who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter
is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be
ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are
restructuring the way our meetings will be.

New Meeting Structure
We will be splitting our PHP meetings into 2 parts. First part is basic
skills / best practices training. This is for you new guys who want to
learn, but don't know where to start. This section is called PHP
fundamentals and will be hosted by Justin Carmony. He and I are working on
some printed materials and are ramping this up as we speak. We also have
several very senior and tenured members who are VERY friendly to questions.
The second portion of our meeting will be a more advanced topic that will be
of benefit to intermediate / advanced members, but will still be of great
benefit to those who are new.

Still Social!
For those interested in the social aspect of our meeting, we still have the
famous UPHPU Afterhours party.

Resources
As far as learning resources, Ray Hunter and I are working on having books
available at our meetings. While we will have some fun / zany way of
handing out the books, there is an understood condition of receiving the
book. You MUST write a review of the book and post it online. If you don't
want to write a review, don't take the book. I will be breaking arms on
this!

Online Resources
I know that our recordings have been sporadic. i'm working on allocating
more time to this.

Whew! All that said, here is the meeting info:

Meeting Thursday, January 21st at 7pm @ Bill Good Marketing in Draper

Bill Good Marketing
12393 Gateway Park Place
Draper, Ut 84020

PHP Fundamentals by Justin Carmony - RTFM - Reading the Fabulous Manual
For a new person to PHP, reading the documentation can be a daunting task.
Even worse when you have legions of other developers screaming the acronym
"RTFM!" Hopefully we can shed some light on how to get the most out of PHP
Documentation, how to search it, how to understand it, and how to get help
if the documentation doesn't answer your questions. Justin Carmony will be
giving the presentation, and will leave time for questions. You're not alone
in learning PHP, let the Utah PHP Usergroup help you.

Justin Carmony has worked in web development professionally for the last
five years. With emphasis on PHP, .NET, and Web Services, he has worked on
projects ranging from simple websites to complex communications between
thousands of remote systems. He currently is working as an independent
contractor & private consultant. If you have any questions, comments, or
curiosities you can contact him (justin AT justincarmony DOT com) or read
about his latest endeavors at his blog.

Advanced Topic by Trevor Sharpe - Basic Linux Server Administration
Many programmers are finding themselves needing to understand and administer
linux servers. This presentation is focused on learning how to effectively
use the server through scripts, etc. Q & A session on admining to follow.

Trevor Sharpe is a Systems Administrator for a company in SLC and is also a
board member for Utah Open Source.

Look forward to seeing everyone this year!

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I can't believe that 2009 has gone by so quickly. Its been a blast of a year. My last post was a little recap of it, but I'm hoping to make the best of 2010.

I've been thinking of a few things I want to accomplish in 2010, and here is a quick list of some of them. I'll blog at a later date in more detail on exactly how I'm planning on accomplishing this.

• First off, get into shape! Being a web developer is a pretty stationary job. Especially on days where I work from home. My first goal is to work out 4 days a week before I start my day. So the plan is to wake up, work out for 30-40 minutes, and then get ready for the day. Also, by no means, what-so-ever, am I allowed to check my email first. If I check my email first, I end up getting sucked into my work day.
• Second, I'm going to give up Coke / Pepsi for the entire year. Those who know me, that is a tall order. However, I figure if I want to get in shape, those drinks have tons of empty calories I could do without. There is one hitch: what happens when I get that phone call at 2 AM that there is an IT emergency? It happens several times a year unfortunately. So I'm planning on drinking Diet Mountain Dew when that happens. Its not my favorite, which is good, because I don't want to be downing insane amounts of aspartame or splenda.
• Third, increase my productivity & organization. Looking back these last few years, I feel like I have done pretty well and becoming more and more organized. I feel like I'm pretty efficient when it comes to programming, but as always there is room for improvement. I forget things every now and then, and things fall through the crack. This year I want to tighten the screws & get more stuff done.
• Fourth, blog my discoveries. I want to keep my blog up to date with my latest endeavors and solutions that I've found. Hopefully I can get into the habit.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to go into more details on the goals I've outlined. I have several other personal goals, but these are the ones I plan on focusing on now. We'll see how this go.

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I've gone back and looked at this year of 2009, and the things I've blogged about, and I thought I'd give a little recap.

My CSS Conversion

At the beginning of the year I realized I had 100% percent to using CSS. I'm still a little in awe that being such a table junkie I finally did it. There were a few key things that I did to help me learn all the difficult things with CSS. I hope I can help some poor web developer out there understand their CSS a little better.

A Year of PHP IDEs

I really invested some time in trying out and experimenting with several PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I had been using Zend Studio for several years, however more and more I found myself frustrated with it's quirks. However, I haven't had time yet to blog about the new IDE I am using, NetBeans. I've made the switch from Zend Studio to NetBeans, and while I'm not completely sold, I'm still giving it some time. Maybe over christmas break I'll blog some about it.

Interesting Challenges w/ MySQL

While I haven't blogged about most of them, I have had some interesting challenges w/ MySQL over the last year. One was converting 40 Million rows from a MyISAM engine to an InnoDB Engine. I've been having some serious heart-to-heart conversations with MySQL (metaphorically of course) on how I'm going to scale it to millions and billions of rows. I think I've mapped out in my head how we're going to handle it for Dating DNA. That will be one challenge I'll be addressing in 2010.

New Blog Design

This year I got around to re-designing my blog using the Carrington Theme as a base. I kinda like it, but it still could use a little more polish. One day I'll find time to give it that extra polish.

Memcached

This year I really got into the theory on how to design an application with Memcached. I've decreased the load on several websites by using it, and wrote an in-depth article on the theory of caching, and how to implement it effectively. I've been amazed at how well it works, and that I hadn't used it before.

A Year of Presentations

I've given two presentations this year, my Memcached presentation at UPHPU, and my "Real Life Scaling" presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I got great feedback from both presentations, and I look forward to what I'll present on this upcoming year. I'm thinking about putting together a presentation called "Being a Web Ninja with jQuery," and showing of the dozen of awesome applications I've built using jQuery.

Utah Open Source Conference 2009

This year I helped organize and throw together the Utah Open Source Conference. I was made the Sponsorship Manager, and it was interesting trying to talk to companies in a recession about donating to a non-profit conference. I haven't had a chance to blog about different techniques on how to professional ask for money for something like this, but hopefully in 2010 I'll be able to share some insights.

Things I Didn't Blog About

There were a lot of things I didn't get around to blogging about this year. I'll quickly touch on them here, and hopefully in 2010 I'll be able to blog about them more.

Web Services - I've done a LOT of web service work. Web services provide a unique challenge, since many times its hard to debug them. At my old job, one of the biggest challenges is we really couldn't debug our web services until all of the other pieces of the puzzle were done. Then we spent long hours with trial and error, debugging via dumping logs. I've learned a lot of tricks with PHP and web services. Hopefully I'll be blog more about those soon.

Performance Tuning LAMP - I've had to do a lot of tuning to keep the Dating DNA website afloat. Because of the awesomeness of our iPhone apps, we've had a lot of load on our web servers. There are a lot of things you can do to get the LAMP stack to run well.

Alienware Arena - Here was a fun little project I was able to crank out for probably the largest client I've done work for: Dell. We made them a website for their Alienware brand called "Alienware Arena."

There were a lot of challenges to this website, mainly timeline and budget. But we were able to walk away happy with our work, and the Dell / Alienware team were really happy. It was interesting going through and trying to copy / mimic the look and feel of the Alienware website. I'm really proud of what we made.

Never Ending iPhone App Store Saga - Anyone who knows me has heard of the bloody wars that my current employer has had with Apple, their iPhone, and the App Store. The ridiculous approval process, the extremely long wait periods, and Apple's OCD when it comes to their phone. I won't say much anything else on the topic, but boy it has been frustrating.

What to Expect with 2010

Boy, 2010 will be interesting. What to expect? I'll be doing some pretty sick programming in jQuery, as I'll be adding integrating chat to the Dating DNA website. What else? A lot more when it comes to integrating websites into other social network platforms.

From a business platform, 2010 will be a lot of work spent on taking some great ideas and trying to monetize them. While working on awesome stuff is great, its important to pay the bills with them. I will have an entire year to sign up Sponsors for the 2010 UTOS Conference instead of 2 short months.

Hopefully I'll get in a better habit of documenting my discoveries and solutions here in my blog. Sharing information is the best way to help everyone out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and good luck in the new year! 2010, here we come!

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I will have to say that belonging to a local PHP user group has been an awesome experience. A little over a year ago I somehow stumbled upon the Utah PHP Usergroup, ran by a now good friend Victor Villa. I had no idea other people were meeting on a monthly basis to talk about PHP and web development stuff. I joined their IRC channel on freenode, and I instantly found a great little resource for myself. Within two months of regularly using the IRC channel, I decided to drive the hour down to where the meetings are held. I now go almost every month whenever possible. I miss now and then due to family functions and such, but for the most part I make the trek down from Ogden to Murray to enjoy the meetings. There are a few things that I found local user groups (LUGs) can provide others that I'd like to share.

Resource for Help

Its amazing the wealth of knowledge that the rest of the members bring to the user group. My experience in asking for help with advanced issues has be much more positive than trying to ask on forums or the regular PHP channel on freenode. The reason? Over time you build up friendships and acquaintances with the other members, and you get a feel for their different skill sets. When asking help from total strangers, especially as a veteran developer, most people will assume that I am a newbie, and typically ask "why would you want to do that?" instead of "here is how I'd do that." I felt like I would spend more time explaining how I had logically arrived at my decision to use technique X or technology Y rather than getting actually help with my problem.

With the user group, we know each other and skip the whole "determining if you're a newbie or not" phase. This is great for both experienced developers and new comers, as we are able to help each other out quicker since we already know where the other person is coming from.

Another great aspect of the user group is that we're not all 100% exclusive PHP people. Each person has other unique skills that we can draw upon. There are two or three guys who are killer system administrators. They have helped me on numerous occasions to point me in the right direction to solve a Linux problem. Another two guys are Database Gurus who have vast experience with HUGE databases. We have some guys who rock at CSS/HTML/JavaScript, which I typically find myself fielding a lot of those questions. I've also had the opportunity to share some tips on Web Services and Mobile Web Development. I've probably had 3-4 non-PHP questions answered for every PHP related question. It is just so awesome.

Friendship & Fun

One thing I've missed since leaving my old job and doing full time contract work are my co-workers. Oh I know, sometimes they can drive you absolutely nuts. However, on the flip side, working basically alone every day, and my only contact with other work people are with my main client via Skype. While my wife is super smart, she doesn't appreciate my war stories of adding a simple index that took down the entire website, or how I improved our DB performance one day by 40%. On a daily basis I don't get to talk with other developers about development stuff. I missed that a lot from my old work, where I could talk about this stuff with co-workers.

Going to the PHP meetings helps bridge that gap. Its fun talking & discussion at the meeting about whatever topic we have. Then we go to the local Applebee's for the "after-meeting-get-together" and shoot the breeze for a few hours. I get to talk to other PHP guys, swap war stories, exchanges ideas and techniques, etc. It helps satisfy the social aspect that working as a solo developer can lack.

Getting Involved & Giving Back

One year after starting attending the meetings I got "roped into" helping with the Utah Open Source Conference. I presented there on scaling, and helped organize with the sponsors. It was an opportunity to "give back" to the community for all the awesome things they provide here in Utah. Many user groups do "bug hunts" and other activities that help open source projects, and enable people to "give back" to the different communities.

I highly recommend seeing if there are any local user groups that pertain to what you enjoy in your area. They provide a great experience to meet new people, learn new things, and have some fun.

Thanks UTOS & UPHPU.

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I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Here is the original comic:

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