Category Archives: nginx

Conferences, nginx, open source, PHP

Conferences, development, ideas, …

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I just returned from PHPCon Poland, a very nice conference taking place in the middle of beautiful scenery. Although there were only 5 talks in English (3 of which were given by Belgians – Thijs Feryn, Michelangelo Van Dam and myself), the conference was definitely interesting and fun.
I gave a relatively new talk, that I first presented as a 20-min ‘lightning talk’ at ZendCon Uncon 2011. It’s evolved into a 45-min talk (ok, it was only 38-min so I can add some content next time) titled ‘Remove PHP calls and scale your site like crazy’ in which I explain more about the Nginx extension we’re building to improve the performance and scalability of sites with user-specific content. I received some pretty good feedback on Joind.in and lots of people approached me afterwards, wanting to learn even more about it.

I also submitted 6 talks for Confoo, which is supposed to be one of the best web development conferences out there. Not sure if I’ll make it, but if you want to help out, feel free to vote for me. Registration is required to vote, but takes only a minute.

Lots of ideas buzzing in my head, but sadly not enough time to work on them. The Nginx thing is cool, but it’s what I call ‘phase 1’… which means there’s a ‘phase 2’ (in fact, there’s even a ‘phase 3’). But since that requires even more time, it’ll probably be for when phase 1 has been completed.

In the meantime, we’re on the hunt for people looking for a new challenge. If you’re looking to be seriously challenged, check out our jobs page and feel free to tweet/mail/call me 😉

caching, nginx, open source, PHP, scalability, tuning, zendcon

Zendcon, ACL talk, conferences and other stuff

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ACL talk (Zend Webinar)
Remember I promised to post the code of my ACL Webinar somewhere in August ? That didn’t really happen, partly because of a lack of time, partly because after my initial hard drive crash (which made me lose my slides and code), I had another crash in August and then my boot SSD drive crashed in September. Dell was kind enough to replace the power supply, motherboard and 1 disk, but my data was lost (unless I pay over 500EUR to have it recovered, which is a bit too pricy for my liking).
So all those setbacks caused a lot of delay on my promise. Nevertheless, I presented the talk again at the Zendcon Unconference, also mentioning the plans I have in store for version 2. But ofcourse, I’ll have to release version 1 first. Currently I’m using DHTMLX Treeview for the backend treeview interface, but I’m not allowed to redistribute the commercial version I bought. So as soon as I can replace the backend treeview interface with a free one, I’ll release the entire code, including instructions on how to set it up. And since development for version 2 is already underway, I want to make sure I make a good choice there 😉

Zendcon 2011
Last week I spent a few days at Zendcon in Santa Clara, CA. I saw lots of interesting session there and presented 2 sessions during the Zendcon Unconference (community style version of the main conference) :

  • Creating dynamic ACLs in Zend Framework : the Zend Webinar I presented in August
  • Scaling dynamic sites like static sites : a first glimpse on a new Nginx module we’re building to make dynamic sites behave more like static sites in terms of scalability, without losing their dynamic nature

I received some encouraging comments, so I’m looking forward to presenting more on these topics in the next few months. The Nginx talk should also have some real-world benchmarks the next time I present it.
If you saw either one of my talks, please rate it at Joind.in

Next talks
I’m scheduled to talk at 2 more conferences this year :

  • T-Dose (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on Nov 5-6, 2011 :
    • Nov 5 @ 11:00 : Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability – the talk I presented at phpBenelux, Dyncon and FrOSCon, this time in a condensed 50 minute version – this talk discusses the techniques you can use to keep your site running when it goes from 5 to 5 million visitors/day
    • Nov 6 @ 12:00 : Beyond the code : it’s not (just) about the code ! – a brand-new talk that’s aimed at 80% of developers. Short summary : “Most PHP developers focus on writing code. But creating Web applications is about much more than just wrting PHP. Take a step outside the PHP cocoon and into the big PHP ecosphere to find out how small code changes can make a world of difference on servers and network. This talk is an eye-opener for developers who spend over 80% of their time coding, debugging and testing.”
  • PHP Tour in Lille, France on Nov 24-25, 2011 : Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability – the same talk as on T-Dose, in a condensed version

Working on…
In the next few weeks, expect a few new posts about :

  • A cool new IPv6 project we’ll launch soon
  • Some Zend Framework 2 news and stuff
  • More news on the Nginx module we’re building. At Zendcon, there were 3 large PHP hosters who were interested in testing the solution, so you can expect more posts on that.