Blog

With Google launching their chrome book is significant as it reflects a substantial shift in the world of computing. For the first time ever, the application platform isn’t the operating system, nor is it adobe air, .net or java, it’s the browser. The browser once, a simple tool for fetching and rendering content is now …

Symfony2 is a great web framework. OpenSky is built on this framework and we are one of the largest contributors to it. The primary building block for Symfony2 is a bundle. Through it’s bundle system Symfony 2.0 achieves a level of modularity I haven’t seen in other web frameworks. A bundle permits a developer to add …

If you don’t know Rands (real name Michael Lopp), you should. His blog is full of excellent content from someone who successfully figured out how to transition from managing bits to [amazon_link id="159059844X" target="_blank" ]Managing Humans[/amazon_link] (also the title of his first book). Whether you are a developer, a tech manager, or manage something else, you’ll find …

I’ve decided to expand the scope of this site a bit to be more than just a blog. It makes sense, many of my posts are how tos and often for my own projects. Additionally now each project will have a legitimate project “homepage” for things like GitHub where that’s requested. So without further ado… …

Justin Hileman and I gave a presentation on “Augmenting RDBMS with NoSQL for e-commerce” at the PgEast 2011 conference. This presentation is really the sequel (no pun intended) to my presentation, MongoDB & Ecommerce : A Perfect Combination. This presentation takes you through how we created a hybrid solution blending both sql and nosql to achieve …

In a follow up to my popular post on Symfony2, the open source PHP framework we use at OpenSky, I’m providing an easy guide to getting started using Symfony2. This isn’t your basic “Hello World”, but a practical guide to beginning a project with Symfony2. Requirements To get started with Symfony2 you should have a working …

Symfony2 is the latest brainchild of Fabien Potencier. Essentially he took the excellent advancements brought by PHP 5.3 and combined all the learnings he took away from building Symfony2 as well as established design patterns and best practices often from the Java world and created a modern web framework. Fully utilizing things like namespaces, closures and late static binding Symfony2 is an extremely full featured, modular, and crazy fast framework.

I have spent the last few years tweaking and refining my VIM configuration. This is the ultimate VIM configuration .vimrc file. It is well organized and documented. It is on GitHub so you can always grab the latest. It works well alone, but is intended to be paired with the plugins and configuration found in …

With a single tweet Google CEO Eric Schmidt announce a shift at the top of the search giant. The timing of this announcement can’t help but call to question if someone more youthful is needed at the helm to hold off the tidal waves of Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Odd that Google chose twitter and …

As part of my new years resolution to get in shape and spend less dough I decided that I’d be better of walking from Grand Central to my office on 18th St. I save ~$5 a day not taking the subway and get all the extra benefit of walking the 1.5 miles. A few days …