Andrei Zmievski

I was excited to find out yesterday that my good friend Jon Tan has joined some more of my good friends at OmniTI as their new Creative Director. I met Jon at OSCON in Portland this year and he’s a fantastic fellow — great designer with an eye for typography, tech guru, fine cocktail connoiseur and a very funny man indeed. He’ll fit right into the awesome motley crew at OmniTI. Congrats, Jon!

I wrote a short article for PHP Advent site, which is run by my good friend Chris Shiflett. The article is a reworked version of my This is not “American Idol” blog post.
PHP Advent was born last year and its format echoes traditional advent calendars. Each day in December an article written by someone in the PHP community is posted to the site. The topics range from technical to philosophical, and the content is excellent. The second year of PHP Advent has brought us some great posts from the likes of Marco Tabini, Paul Jones, and Ed Finkler. I  didn’t have time to contibute one last year, but I’m glad I made myself sit down over the rainy weekend and write one for this December.
I only wish the site allowed comments. Go ahead and leave them on this post, if you’d like.

All things come to an end, and so does my free, unemployed, wake-up-at-11-if-you-wish bum time. I’m happy to say that come Monday morning I’ll be starting at Digg as their Open Source Fellow. This is an exciting opportunity which will let me dedicate more time to PHP and other open source software, not to mention helping shore up my dwindling savings account.
Digg has a heavy investment in the open source stack and a bunch of really smart people working on it. I’m looking forward to joining the team and sinking my teeth into some very interesting problems. Plus, a major portion of my time will be spent working on PHP itself – yes, that does mean PHP 6 will be a reality that much sooner.
And now I should go take a bike ride and enjoy my remaining leisure time…
UPDATE: This post now really has been Dugg. Oh, the irony of recursion..

I was happy to find out that PHP Québec Conference accepted 2 out of 3 proposals I submitted. I’ll be giving VIM for (PHP) Programmers and Andrei’s Regex Clinic talks. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Montreal in March  including the awesome people from the PHP Québec group – Yann, Philippe, Sylvain, and others.