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Nearly 3 years ago I discovered a new database that literally changed my life. I know, that’s a pretty bold claim, but it’s true. While leading the engineering team at OpenSky I faced a problem I was well familiar with. How to build a e-commerce product that: 1. Provided performance and scale 2. Handled many …

MongoDB is the most full featured scalable database taking the tech world by storm. Drupal is the standard in content management powering magazines, blogs online newspapers and much more. It’s only natural that they would get together to provide a fast dynamic scalable CMS system. Whenever a Drupal site needs to scale dynamic content they …

I wrote a book. Published by O’Reilly, it’s now available on Amazon, O’Reilly Media and a bunch of other sites. It’s available as a ebook as well as in print.

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… …