Andrei Zmievski

Please Start From The Beginning is a video series that explores the career paths and experiences of web industry professionals. I was honored to be interviewed for the series along with such interesting people as Eric Meyer, Joe Stump, and Elliot Jay Stocks. If you to hear about how the heck I started in Web development, this is a video for you.

There have been a few kind words and questions about the GeoIP-based blurb that greets the visitors to our Analog holding page, so I wanted to blog about how it was made and what obstacles I ran into. However, while writing I realized that it would be the perfect candidate for this year’s edition of PHP Advent instead of the article I originally planned to write about Git and Github. So head on over and read about GeoIP Wrangling and feel free to leave your comments here.

It seems that a short time ago, at the php|tek in Chicago, the Code Works conference was just a glimmer in the eye of Marco Tabini and his associates. And today I am in Atlanta, starting off the east coast leg of the conference along with a few of my friends and colleagues. The first part made stops in San Francisco (where I served as a social director since it’s my home town), Los Angeles and Dallas and it sounds like everyone had a great time.

After Atlanta we go onto Miami, which I am only familiar with through Dexter; Washington D.C., where I hope to take in a couple of sights, since I’ve never been; and New York, a city that I always love to visit.

My talks in this conference will cover VIM, regular expressions, and distributed systems with PHP, including memcache, mogilefs, and Gearman. There are many good talks on the schedule, so consider signing up and joining speakers and other attendees for what is bound to be an excellent event.

I have not yet been to South by Southwest festivals. And every time I mention this to friends and colleagues, they make big eyes and say, “You have to go!”. Well, I finally cracked and submitted a panel proposal for the 2010 SXSW Interactive portion. The panel is titled “Travelog with Maps: When 1,000 Photos Aren’t Enough” and will present and discuss ways to preserve the memories and tell the stories of your trips using latest geolocation tools, social data, and a bit of code. Chris Shiflett will be my co-panelist. We decided to do this panel after trying to share our Iceland trip in real-time and discovering what is and isn’t there to support it.

If you like this idea, please vote for this panel. Thank you!

I will be leaving Digg at the end of this month.

The launching point for this decision was my visit in June to Iceland, where I had many opportunities in sublime surrounds to reflect on my life and aspirations. Standing on top of the world  at Sjónarsker, I realized that though my career has spanned some great companies, the next step in my professional life would have to involve building something of my own. Later on, watching a never-ending sunset from the hill at Stykkishólmur, I understood that this something has to happen sooner than later, and serendipitously, an opportunity to do just that has arisen recently. My friend Chris Shiflett, who visited Iceland with me, has similar aspirations and likes to say “good work, good people”, and that is definitely what I intend to do.

Thank you, Joe Stump, for recruiting me. My 8 months at Digg flew by quickly, but the friendships I made there will last for a lifetime, I hope. I have been privileged to work with and next to some of  the best and brightest people that I have met in my life. There is a great road ahead for Diggers as the company advances to stay on the cutting edge of the social news industry. I am sad to be leaving when some very cool developments are afoot, but excited for my own road ahead. By the way, Wine Wednesdays were the best.

I am planning to do a bit of traveling at the end of August and then start September afresh. There is plenty to be done to bring these ideas to life and I cannot wait to share the news when the time is right. Oh, and I’m still going to be involved in PHP, perhaps even more than usual.

Reset. Restart. Renew.

And, seriously, visit Iceland if you have a chance. It is another world.

This morning I released the first stable version (1.0.0) of the PHP memcached extension that I started soon after joining Digg. It’s been stable for a while actually, but some people were hesitant to use it in production while it still had the beta designation. Well, no more, go forth and use it.

As the underlying libmemcached library evolves, I plan to keep adding and exposing more features in the extension. Up next are probably memcached_dump() and server auto-ejection support.

Taking advantage of php|tek bringing a lot of people together, we had a PHP developers meeting over 2 days before the conference. Day 1 was dedicated to technical issues in PHP 5 and 6, and day 2 was spent discussing potential features, migration issues, current roadblocks, etc.

The notes from the meeting are available on the wiki. These notes are not necessarily “decisions”, but they do reflect the consensus of the group that was at the meeting and hopefully present a more structured and outlined list of things that we can follow for PHP 5.4/6.

May has come and gone and for me almost half of it was spent on the road. SFO-DEN-BNA, BNA-ORD, ORD-ZRH-TXL-ZRH-ORD, ORD-SFO. To decipher that for you, I first went to Nashville to visit my friend Raquel and see the land of the honky tonks. I was surprised to find an almost full-sized replica of Parthenon there, as well as a really great ƒood/drink scene. Some highlights include Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack (I dare you to order something more than medium hotness), a great beer place called The Flying Saucer (150+ beers on the menu), and especially The Patterson House (recommended by the awesome Steph Dub), where we spent a few hours snacking on tasty bits from the menu and drinking the awesome cocktails that the bartender mixologists prepared in front of us.

Then it was off to Chicago for php|tek 2009 conference. The first two days were dedicated to the first real PHP developers meet-up since November 2005. On Monday we discussed technical issues with regard to PHP 5.3 and 6, and on Tuesday the topic shifted more towards potential features aside from Unicode to entice people to move to 6 and how to ease this migration. Overall it was a productive meeting and the notes should be posted soon. The next day I gave the opening keynote on the present and future of PHP. I managed to throw in a few inside jokes and funny photos in there to lighten up the morning mood. The rest of the conference was productive as well—there were great talks on everything from utilizing HTTP status codes to multi-level caching to a talk that Cal gave on telecommuting. After the conference hours we stopped by the Map Room a couple times for some excellent beer flights (La Folie on tap, OMG).

@tychay is not happy

After Chicago, I flew to Berlin for the International PHP Conference Spring Edition 2009. This year they accepted all 3 of my proposals, so I had my work cut out for me. Miraculously, I managed to make the German audience smile and even laugh a couple of times during my keynote. Success! The other two talks intl me this, intl me that on localizing and translating your pages, and All the Little Pieces on using PHP with memcached, mogilefs, and Gearman went well too. Funny enough, the RailsWay conference was going on at the same place—didn’t they know that Terry Chay is coming to town?! This was my first visit to Berlin, so Terry and I played tourists for a bit and went to see Checkpoint Charlie, the remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, and Reichstag. It is really amazing to consider that the Berlin Wall used to be 150 km long and embedded a piece of Western Germany in the middle of Eastern one.

Finally, I had a long series of flights home, and despite a mishap at the immigration in Chicago, arrived to my apartment safely and almost on time. It was great to see old friends and new faces and to talk to the best development community out there.

For those of you who wondered where to get the I � Unicode t-shirt that I wore during my keynote, I put the design up on Zazzle, so you can get your own for the next gathering of the Unicode-minded folks.

Yes, it’s true.

A recent post on Twitter from @atourino pointed to my VIM for (PHP) Programmers slidedeck on scribd.com. The slidedeck has been really popular, gathering close to 50,000 views, 2,500 downloads, a few dozen favorites ratings, and a “Hot” award. Good deal, eh? Except that I didn’t upload this slidedeck—someone else did.

Scribd’s about page describes it as the place “where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents”. I’ve used it in the past to find all kinds of documents and there’s a lot to like about the site, but the keyword here is “original”. I really don’t mind sharing the slides—heck, I tell everyone at conferences to download them from my site—but on my Talks page I specifically ask people to obtain permission before re-publishing the slides elsewhere. It’s not a difficult thing to do. So far I’ve resisted putting a copyright notice on every slide, because I was hoping the common sense would apply, but apparently not for everyone.

I contacted Scribd’s customer support to see how I could take the ownership of the document in question. They replied that I would have to submit a DMCA copyright infringement notice and ask for the document to be taken down. I understand that this is their policy, but I think this is going overboard, especially for a case like mine. I really wanted to handle this in a polite manner and in such a way that people’s links to the document wouldn’t break instead of doing the dickish move of demanding it be removed completely. At the same time, I feel that the person who uploaded my slides without permission was wrong. Thus, I had no choice but to send the DMCA notice along with a request for the document to be re-assigned to me.

I would encourage everyone to be more careful in handling publicly available content. Please check for any restrictions on usage and publishing, and if in doubt—ask. This will help avoid resorting to heavy-handed stuff like DMCA notices.