Pacific Northwest PHP 2015

Last week, I returned from the inaugural Pacific Northwest PHP Conference in Seattle, Washington. Like most conferences in the PHP community, there was a strong vibe of getting together with old friends, making some news ones, and enjoying tasty beverages together while we learn cool things. There were a number of great sessions ranging from Sara Golemon talking about PHP […]


PHP5.5 and JSON Licensing or Licenses and You

Everything noted below is professional advice not legal advice. I’m not a lawyer, so check with your legal department or similar before you use open source software, regardless of the license. In terms of software licensing, I have a simple principle: Don’t make things unnecessarily complicated. Let’s face it, most developers don’t understand licensing. They […]


Google App Engine

PHP and Twilio on Google App Engine

As of Google IO this year, Google App Engine officially supports PHP. While it’s still in beta, you can tweak your applications and give it a try right now. I’ve included some of my lessons learned from getting Twilio’s quickstarts functional on GAE. You can read the results here: Getting started with Twilio on Google […]


Sexism in the PHP Community

This blog post heavily quotes my occasional collaborator Cal Evans. The quotes are used with permission. The link to the original is at the bottom. Despite the problems with sexism in the tech community in general, the PHP community has had it pretty easy. While there are potentially a number of reasons, the founder of […]


Beverage Subgroup: The Why and How

Almost six years ago now (whoa!), I was a regular agitator in the Washington, DC PHP Developer’s Community (DCPHP). The community was probably a hundred people with skills ranging from total newbs who couldn’t spell PHP to contributors to major open source projects. At that point, we consisted solely of a monthly presentation-style meeting and a mailing […]


php|tek 2011 Closing Remarks

A few weeks ago at php|tek, I was lucky enough to deliver the Closing Remarks. Well.. it was less “lucky” and more of a “wait.. you haven’t done anything this week, make yourself useful.” So after a week of sessions, midnight hackathons, midnight unconference, tornados, power outages, a red carpet entrance, a family reunion, I […]


php|tek 2011 Hackathon

If you haven’t figured out by now, I attend quite a few conferences and catch a lot of presentations from numerous speakers. I’ve found that most presenters have a sweet spot. They’re good at expressing a concept but don’t get into the code. Others can build ridiculously powerful applications but couldn’t describe the concept if […]


PHPBenelux 2011 Recap

Last week I attended and spoke at the PHPBenelux conference for the first time. What's unique about this conference is that it's entirely run by the local Benelux PHP Users Group. While there was lots of PHP-specific content, it also had a good mix of community and general concept talks too. I gave one session […]