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Where have all the good databases gone? Perhaps you’ll recognize these words, “About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted. … So, what is this growing disconnect?” Those words were written in 2004 …

One of the most frustrating things about bash scripts is how challenging it is to create unix style executibles. You know, the ones where you can pass in -h or –help and see the set of options for the program. Up until now this has been a very manual process in bash, but no longer. …

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 …

Justin Hileman and I presented at  MongoNYC 2011 to  a packed house. Our presentation outlines both why someone would want to use MongoDB for ecommerce and how we overcame some of it’s limitations by incorporating mysql into our infrastructure.

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.