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MongoDB is often used alongside a relational database such as Oracle or MySQL. It is often unclear when one should use one or the other, or if a combination is really ideal. During this online presentation, we will discuss the ideal use cases for each, and how they can be used in conjunction. We’ll make …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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.