OSCON 2008

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at OSCON again. I have the pleasure of co-presenting an Extending PHP tutorial session with Marcus Boerger, giving a new talk entitled Hot Chocolate: Creating Cocoa apps with PHP, and the tried and true PDO Talk. As always, I'm looking forward to catching up on what's going on outside of my usual stack of software, meeting up with friends and making a visit to my favourite restaurant. I hope to see you there :-)

Syndicated 2008-04-05 16:29:58 from Evil, as in Dr.

C and Test Engineer Jobs @ Message Systems

I've got a couple of full-time positions open on my engineering team. We believe in a fun but focused development environment: open-plan, flexible hours, and great benefits. Our customers include Fortune-500 companies, hot startups and tier-1 telecommunications carriers. Our software helps those customers deliver billions of email messages per day. <h2>Email Infrastructure Software Engineer (x2) </h2>

I'm looking for one mid-level and one mid-to-senior-level engineer with strong "C" programming skills (3+ years of professional experience). These roles involve design, implementation and testing of our flagship email server product. E-mail encompasses a very broad range of standards and specifications which in turn means that our code base touches on a little bit of everything; it's both interesting and challenging. [Full Job Description] <h2>Gozer (The Destructor) </h2>

I'm also looking for someone with a knack for breaking things. This person would be dedicated to dreaming up ways to make the product stress out, panic and fall over, and distilling that abuse into test cases to run in our white box, smoke testing, stress and soak testing environments. This position requires strong Perl skills and 3-5 years industry experience. [Full Job Description]

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Syndicated 2008-02-01 20:31:27 from Evil, as in Dr.

PDO 2 and CLA

You may be aware that we're starting discussions on the future of PDO; despite being pretty good for many common uses, it isn't perfect, and we want to improve it. One of the items to be discussed is whether we can or should adopt a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which will make it simpler for the database vendors to work together with us on PDO.

The discussion is aimed chiefly at the "core developer" community, that is, the people that are working on the internals code for PHP, because the CLA would impact how they contribute to PDO. The broader PHP user/developer community would not be affected by a CLA (if we were to go that route), as it would not affect their ability to use PDO in their applications.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, you might be interested in reading the transcript of a conversation I had on IRC this evening; you can find it below. It's between myself and a few members of the PHP Community IRC channel on FreeNode (used with their permission!), and I think it does a good job of explaining in fairly simple and somewhat unbiased terms a couple of the main arguments for and against the CLA. I'm not saying that this is all there is to it, just that these are likely to be the main points that the core developers need to discuss first.

It would be premature to say that you are for or against PDO 2 at this stage because we are yet to define what PDO 2 will actually be; that is the purpose of the discussion on the PDO mailing list.

If, after reading this, you have questions or comments of your own, then please read the email that Andi and myself put together, take a look at the FAQ, and if your question is still unanswered, join the discussion on the PDO mailing list (read the archives first!) Browse it via the web, over NNTP, or subscribe via email.

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Syndicated 2008-01-25 05:35:29 from Evil, as in Dr.

PHP London 2008

I was scheduled to appear at PHP London 2008, but due to unforeseen circumstances, I've had to cancel my trip and back out from the conference. I don't like doing this, but unfortunately don't have much of a choice. Thankfully, the PHP London folks have managed to find replacement speakers for the two sessions that I was going to give.

If you're going to be in or around London on the leap day (February 29^th), or are within commutable distance, then you might consider attending the conference; it's a one day conference with a number of expert speakers from the PHP Community. If you sign up now, the early bird rate is only GBP 90. Find out more at their web site.

I was really looking forward to this conference, and I'm sorry that I'm going to miss it; I hope you have fun!

Syndicated 2008-01-23 15:55:12 from Evil, as in Dr.

Message Systems, Inc.

At the start of this year, we spun off the email product side of OmniTI into its own entity, Message Systems, Inc. This marks another step on the road to dominating the world with our awesome software.

I've also changed roles; I'm now the Director of Engineering at Message Systems. I'm looking forward to see what challenges are in store for me, and will try hard to avoid adopting too much suit talk (I've already found myself using a few phrases that would have made me cringe last year).

What does this mean for me and PHP? Despite the increased responsibility, I think it should actually give me a bit more PHP time than I've had in the past (I'll have more control over my destiny). I should still be able to attend PHP related events, and I still deal with PHP (we use it for the management GUI in the product).

What about OmniTI? Well, we're still part of the family and share office space, jokes and good times at our HQ in Maryland.

Syndicated 2008-01-23 02:56:10 from Evil, as in Dr.