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I had the opportunity to present at the PHP Cloud Summit 2011 among some great presenters. This was first time speaking at an online conference. Thanks to the diligent efforts from Cal, Keith and Jeremy at PHPArch it was a really successful experience. I actually presented with two Macbooks. One open to IRC where questions were coming …

Presentation given at PHP’s biggest conference, ZendCon 2011. Covers the basics of using MongoDB with PHP.

One of the weaknesses of PHP as a languages has always been it’s ability to write proper command line utilities. Yes PHP is pretty much built to drive the web, and it does that rather well, but there are plenty of reasons to want to be able to write a program that is callable from …

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 …

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.

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.

GitHub Code Viewer 2 is a plugin for wordpress that will automatically pull a file from github and place into any post using a shortcode You need cURL installed to use GitHub_Code_Viewer. It caches the code locally (in db), so it’s quite fast and can be even faster when combined with wp_super_cache or w3c_total_cache. It …

Last night I gave a presentation on MongoDB & Ecommerce. OpenSky is the first company to use MongoDB in production for ecommerce. I shared why we went this route, and why it’s an obvious and powerful combination. At OpenSky we use MongoDB to develop the next ecommerce platform. OpenSky also uses Symfony 2, Doctrine 2, …

I have spent the last few years tweaking and refining my VIM configuration until I had the Ultimate Vim Config.  It is well organized and documented taking full advantage of Tpope’s pathogen for a excellent clean and modular configuration. The Ultimate vim config contains the perfect .vimrc file combined with an excellent set of plugins …