I am a software developer, web developer, entrepreneur, and an advocate of free/open source software, open standards, and open content. I am the technical director and co-founder of Found Line—a creative firm located in Burlington, Vermont—where I develop standards-based, accessible, and cross-browser compatible web applications.
I’ll be speaking at this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). O’Reilly has introduced a new conference to be co-located with OSCON called OSCON Data which will “focus on the practical nuts and bolts of dealing with data.” I’ll be giving a three hour tutorial at OSCON Data on Learning CouchDB and a forty minute [...]
April 20, 2011 – 12:39 pm
A new startup called Kohort is looking to add a PHP developer to their team here in Burlington, Vermont. The job description is as follows: We’re a new startup with some venture backing. We’re looking to add an experienced developer to help us out for the next five weeks (and possibly more). Qualifications are: experienced [...]
Working at a small company (Found Line), there aren’t as many opportunities to talk with and learn from a diverse set of co-workers as there might be at a larger organization. This is part of the reason why I organize our local PHP Users Group and am involved with other community events (VAGUE, Vermont Code [...]
March 30, 2011 – 10:41 am
My latest book, Scaling CouchDB, is now available in ebook format. This is a short book (about 72 pages) and serves as a practical guide to scaling CouchDB and designing a distributed system to meet your capacity needs. Replication, conflict resolution, load balancing, clustering, distributed load testing, and monitoring are covered. The chapters on load [...]
March 28, 2011 – 12:41 pm
Almost two years ago, Luke Wroblewski first described a trend in web development called mobile first. The basic idea was that web applications should be designed for mobile first, as opposed to designed for the desktop first. Luke provided some compelling reasons for this including the explosive growth of mobile adoption, the fact that mobile [...]
At last night’s Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group meeting I gave a presentation on Load Balancing with Apache: Load Balancing with Apache View more presentations from Bradley Holt I’ve posted the example configuration files for reference. Basic load balancing: Sticky sessions in PHP: Create your own sticky sessions: Route based on HTTP method: Distributed load [...]
Cal Evans, PHP community member extraordinaire, has started a new podcast called Voices of the ElePHPant. The podcast is a series of short “interviews with the people that are making the PHP community special.” So far, Cal has interviewed ten different members of the PHP community: Jeremy Kendall, Anna Filina, Matthew Turland, Paul M. Jones, [...]
March 22, 2011 – 12:23 pm
Today you can save 50% on the purchase of any ebook or video from O’Reilly Media and they will donate all revenues, less author royalties, from today’s “Deal of the Day” sales to the Japanese Red Cross Society. Like many other authors, I’ve opted to also donate my royalties from today’s “Deal of the Day” [...]
March 11, 2011 – 11:00 pm
If you’re in Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive, be sure to check out the Big Data and APIs for PHP Developers Workshop that I’m curating. The Workshop speakers will be Julie Steele, Laura Thomson, Eli White, Dennis Yang, and David Zülke. The session will be on Monday, March 14, 2011 from 11am to 1:30pm at [...]
The other day Chris Dixon tweeted: strategy != tactics. Having a website was strategic in 1995, seo was strategic in 2005, mobile is strategic today. Chris is likely talking about startups here (since startups are the focus of much of his writing). If you’re not sure what the difference is between a strategy and tactics, [...]
