I am thrilled to say that I have accepted a position as a Support Engineer at Stripe. Here are the why’s and how’s of my decision.
Continue Reading...Although I’m able to charge a nice hourly rate, I’m all too aware that vast amounts of what I do doesn’t map to an hourly charge to any client. A considerable amount of my time is spent (in no particular order):
Writing blog posts
Replying to blog comments
Answering support forum questions
Dabbling in social media
Doing my company accounting
Reading and replying to email
While some, if not all, of these actions may financially benefit me in terms of selling more books, there’s no direct monetary association for them, and they take a considerable amount of time to perform. Time that could be better spent billing clients!
Of this list, too much time is spent in email. I suspect that’s something we can all attest to. The ironic problem with optimizing the efficiency of your routines is that you have to find the time to do so. Fortunately, I just recently read Nikil Viswanathan’s post “How to Win at Email”.
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I’m very happy to say that I’ll be speaking at the 2013 Northeast PHP Conference, taking place in Boston on August 16-18. This is the second year of the Northeast PHP Conference, and my first year attending. I’ve heard excellent things about last year’s event, and am thrilled to be participating. I’m also fortunate enough to know several people in the Boston PHP community now, so it’ll be great to see them again.
I’ve actually been selected to do three presentations, all of which are new for me (I’ll be pretty busy in July!). Those presentations are…
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This is the third and final issue of my two-part newsletter on “going big”. (Yes, third in a two-part series.) By “going big” I mean how one transitions from a Web site with little to moderate traffic, to one that can handle tons of traffic. The first newsletter looked at going big from the macro perspective: theory, implementation, hardware, and networking. The second newsletter was the first look at the micro perspective: how to write code that scales well. The emphasis there was on the code itself, along with the development process.
In this newsletter, I’ll provide a couple of resources for two other key components: the underlying database and the user’s browser. As always, questions, comments, and all feedback are much appreciated. And thanks for your interest in what I have to say and do!
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Yesterday I (finally, finally, finally) posted another update to “The Yii Book”. This is version 0.7, with two new chapters:
Chapter 15, “Internationalization”
Chapter 16, “Leaving the Browser”
This adds about 40 more pages of material, bringing the total to around 405 pages as a PDF.
These two chapters do reflect a change in the table of contents, but I’ve not removed any planned content, just re-arranged it. The next two chapters are:
