Introducing TillStore

Update, 2009-10-24: Fixed a bug, and committed a couple other improvements — TillStore 0.2.0 is released! I went to nosqlberlin last week and I got inspired. I listened to a lot of interesting talks — most notably about Redis, CouchDB, Riak and MongoDB (I’m omitting two talks, which of course were not less awesome than the rest!) Due to an unfortunate circumstance I had six hours to hack on stuff from Thursday to Friday....

October 24, 2009 · 2 min

Thoughts on RightScale

RightScale provides all kinds of things — from a pre-configured MySQL master-slave setup (with automatic EBS/s3 backups), to a full LAMP stack, Rails app servers, virtually all kinds of other pre-configured server templates to a nifty auto-scaling feature. We decided to leverage RightScale when we planned our move to AWS a couple months ago in order to not have to build everything ourselves. I’ve been writing this blog entry for the past five weeks and here are some observations, thoughts and tips....

October 20, 2009 · 3 min

DevHouseBerlin aftermath!

This year’s DevHouseBerlin is almost over, and this is what I managed to do. Planet-PHP Planet-PHP’s code has been opensourced for a while and when I started setting up a planet for PEAR I wasn’t exactly happy with what it did. Aside from the obvious PHP4 vs. PHP5 issues, the unfortunate lack of documentation, I don’t understand why anyone wants to transform an XSL with PHP, to generate PHP. And the bottom line, it didn’t work always and I didn’t want to debug it any longer....

October 4, 2009 · 2 min

A case for PEAR and PHP4 (Or, why BC is important!)

Every once in someone likes to argue that PEAR is all fugly PHP4 code and why you should not use it, and instead go and use another framework or component library. Most of those people also say that they looked at or used PEAR x years ago and then act all surprised when someone else disagrees. In related (BC) news, most people probably read my blog because of Zend Framework, and I remember that one of the reasons I sold my clients on Zend Framework was a supposedly backward compatibility and clean API....

September 22, 2009 · 5 min

My first PHP Unconfernce

I went to Hamburg last weekend to visit the PHP Unconference, which was probably my first conference ever. I’ve been to a couple barcamps and other smaller events, but anyway, this felt more like a real conference to me. That is, if I exclude ALA and the various ad:tech’s I had to go to. The reasons why I usually avoid tech conferences include foremost the price tag (working for myself, I can technically label it as an expense, but I still have to pay for it), doubts that it’ll be worth it in terms of knowledge gained and probably time....

September 18, 2009 · 3 min