Andrei Zmievski

If you use FeedBurner, you probably know that they were acquired by Google recently. They are also forcing you to migrate your account to Google on the next login. This presents a couple of issues detailed by Chris Shiflett in his post.
I’m going to attempt to avoid spamming my subscribers with a ton of recent posts by making sure that the feed contains only the posts dated after the migration. Chris and I are pretty sure that it will work, but I guess the only way is to push the button and see. If this works, I’ll post a quick explanation of how to hack WordPress to modify your feed this way.

Here’s a breakdown of the talks I will be giving over the next couple of months.

PHP Québec Conference

VIM for (PHP) Programmers

Are you stuck choosing between Komodo, Zend Studio, PHPEdit, or Eclipse as your next IDE? Did you just come to Unix from Windows and wonder how to translate your “1337” Notepad skills to the new platform? Have you pulled out most of your hair struggling to make your current editor do something more complicated than proper indentation? Or do you feel that perhaps you use only 5% of VIM’s potential but desire to learn the true magic?

Then head over to this popular session and grab a seat, because you don’t want to be left standing when everyone else shows up to see what VIM has in store for PHP developers. Plus, it’ll help that hair grow back.

Andrei’s Regex Clinic

Regular Expressions: every developer’s best friend and worst nightmare!

Join Andrei Zmievski, PHP developer and author of the PHP Regex (PCRE) extension, on a journey that will take you from your first steps into the world of regular expressions to complete mastery of this most useful of tools.

A must for everyone who’s ever wondered what /(?\d+)bar/ means.

php|tek

Mid-conference Keynote: The Future of PHP 6

After a brief hiatus, PHP 6 has picked up momentum and is on track for a release. Join Andrei as he covers the salient changes, updates, and new features of the next generation of our favorite language and how they can be useful in your everyday development.

International PHP Conference

intl me this, intl me that

What are the problems with and best solutions to translating your web site or application into other languages? This session will cover several approaches to this problem based on PHP, focusing on utilizing the new intl extension as well as other open source tools. Warning: some live translations may be performed for the audience!

All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP

Quick, what do memcache, MogileFS, and Gearman have in common? They are scalable, distributed technologies, and they can also interface with PHP, your ubiquitous Web development language. Digg uses all 3 (and a few more) in its quest for social news domination, and this session will share much of what we’ve learned about them and how they are best utilized with PHP.

The Present and Future of PHP

This keynote will explore the innovations coming with the next generation of PHP, the roadmap to development and delivery, and what you can do to be prepared when the big day comes.

Part of my job description at Digg is to speak, present, and evangelize publicly on a variety of technical issues including open source technologies and their adoption within Digg, so I thought I’d do an update on the upcoming conferences that I’ll be speaking at.
At PHP UK Conference – London (February 27) I’ll be giving my “intl me this, intl me that” talk that got high marks at the last OSCON. The talk covers problems with and approaches to translating your web applications.
For PHP Québec Conference – Montréal (March 4-6) I will have two familiar and popular talks, “Andrei’s Regex Clinic” and “VIM for (PHP) Programmers”.
And finally php|tek – Chicago (May 19-22) has asked me to do the mid-conference keynote on the state and future of PHP.
I’d better kick PHP 6 into gear.

UPDATE: I will not be at the PHP UK Conference due to a visa mishap.

The first project that I’ve been working on since joining Digg has seen the light of day. It’s a new PHP extension for interfacing with memcache servers and it is based on the libmemcached library, which is becoming the standard client library for this task. It’s used by Python, Ruby, Perl, and now – PHP. The extension is available from PECL [1]. There is another memcache PECL extension, but this one offloads the intricacies of communicating with memcache onto libmemcached and instead concentrates on exposing a sensible API and some cool features like asynchronous requests and read-through caching callbacks.
I’m excited about this release and looking forward to putting out more stuff soon.
Now, to write the documentation..
1. http://pecl.php.net/package/memcached

This 7 Things meme has been going around, and despite having been tagged by a couple of people I tried to stay away from it, but Chris Shiflett proved to be the proverbial straw to my proverbial camel, so here goes my entry.
My 7 things, in no particular order are:

1. I have an affinity for languages. I can start to pick up words and phrases after being in a new language environment for a couple of days. This usually leads to me getting a book or taking lessons, and this is how I randomly know some Norwegian, Korean, and can read most of Katakana. The language I’ve invested most into – about a year of classes – is French. My reading comprehension is good, but definitely need to keep studying to improve hearing and speaking ones. The love for languages is also responsible for me doing a Master’s degree in Linguistics at San Jose State University, which, sadly, I had to abandon halfway through due to moving to San Francisco.
2. I know how to sail. I love being on the water, and I always wanted to try sailing, and once I moved to Bay Area I had no more excuses, because this is one of the best places in the world to learn that. I got my first level certification at Spinnaker Sailing, which means that I can take out boats up 27 feet long for a day sail. So not that I’m going to enter America’s Cup anytime soon, but I am pretty confident on the water and I will probably take some more lessons this year. My dream is to cross Pacific on a boat someday.
3. I have knack for identifying Polish accents. Not sure where this particular talent comes from, but I’ve done it a few times on a bet. It works particularly well when an attractive waitress or barmaid is the subject of such a bet. 🙂
4. I am not really from Russia. My friends love calling me by the nickname “White Russian”, and Shiflett went an extra mile and made a t-shirt featuring this, but I’ve misled them all. I am actually ¾ Ukranian and only a ¼ Russian, and I was born and grew up in Uzbekistan. So I wonder if I can concoct a drink called White Ukranian. Any ideas?
5. I met my ex-girlfriend at a PHP conference, specifically the awesome PHP Cruise to Bahamas, put on by PHP Architect. Some of you were there, and some of you heard stories. All of them are true. Or none of them. I don’t remember anymore.
6. I’ve never been skydiving or bungee jumping. And I’m not planning on doing either one. But I did enjoy the glider flight that Jeremy Zawodny took me on.
7. Even though I was always interested in computers, I wasn’t planning to end up in Web stuff. My passion back in the days was computer graphics, and my dream was to work on visual effects for films. I took Fine Arts classes ending up with a minor in that subject, went to SIGGRAPH for 6 years, interviewed with such companies as ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks, and spent a lot of money on graphics gear and software – hey, I even had an SGI O2, if you remember what that was. In the end, I was fortunate enough to realize that my talents lay elsewhere and that I would be more successful if I applied them properly.

I think I might be the last person in the PHP world doing this, so I am not going tag anyone.

At Digg pretty much the whole company hangs out on an internal IRC channel. Funny stuff comes up all the time. Here’s the latest sampling:

<ieure> [link to a story]
<andrei> ieure: couldn’t they keep an eye on him?
<ieure> Didn’t see that coming.
<ieure> Blindsided, as it were.
<ieure> Okay, these puns are getting way too cornea.
<sfrench> no way, eye am perfectly fine with it
<andrei> i ris my case.

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.