Premature Optimization

As part of my job at Zend, I was invited by Adobe to Adobe Max in San Francisco - how cool is that? It’s a huge conference (thousands of participants - nothing like any PHP conference I know!) with so many presentations to sit in it’s just hard to choose.

Of course, I am no designer and tend to stick to the server side - so for me choosing was easier, but still confusing.

In any case if you are there, or in down town San Francisco, come and say hi!

From time to time I get reminders to why I love open source so much, and why I see it as having little to do with software and a lot to do with promoting a culture of sharing and of openness.

A few days ago I released my first C open source app - Glista. It was a little tool I wrote to scratch an itch and to sharpen my hardly-existing C skills. Deciding to release it was natural, but I didn’t expect much attention from such a simple tool competing in a category where many alternatives exist.

However, it did get noticed and I had several people e-mailing suggestions, reporting bugs and generally commenting on it, giving mostly positive and useful feedback. I was able to fix several bugs in the last few days and I did learn a few things on creating better build scripts, which I was clueless about before.

And the best thing is that at less than a week after it’s initial release, Glista was ported to run on an iPaq PDA using the OpenEmbedded cross-compiler. I even got some screenshots to show off:

How cool is that?

This is done using the unstable branch of OpenEmbedded so there are no official builds yet - but the author, Dmitry, has attached a recipe file to this bug report in the OpenEmbedded tracker if you want to try it.

After what is probably the longest period of being at home without flying anywhere (since November!) in the last 3 years, I am actually quite excited to be flying again.

After a quick visit to Zend’s Cupertino office, I will be attending two conferences in may: I’ll be visiting the last couple of days (May 22nd - 23rd) of php|tek in Chicago - in which I will not be presenting, but will probably hang around with the Zend guys and go to some lectures.

After spending the weekend with friends in New York City, I’m flying to Germany to attend DLW Europe - a first-year conference dedicated to dynamic languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl etc.). There’s quite a lot of known PHPers attending and speaking, and it looks like it’s going to be a blast. Personally I will be giving a talk I call “Non-framework Zend Framework Components” (working title) - which will showcase some of the more useful components of Zend Framework for those who do not want to base their entire application on it - but rather just need to preform tasks and want to reuse the high-quality components of ZF in order to do that.

So it looks like quite a road trip: Tel Aviv -> San Francisco -> Chicago -> New York -> Karlsruhe -> Tel Aviv - by the end of it I might be able to buy a MacBook Pro using frequent flyer miles only

If you’re in either conferences - come over and say hi!

I am giving a security lecture at the local PHP users group tomorrow, and one of the topics is, ahm, security by obscurity. In fact, it’s not really a topic - I just mention it and say that it’s not really an approach to security, and should generally only be used as an extra measure and should not to be relied on.

This got me thinking about one of my old-time favorite Monty Python sketches:

The first rule of not being seen: not to stand up!

It’s been a week since I got to Hyderabad, India - but today was the first day I actually got to hang around a little bit and not only work. So first of all, I’ve posted some pictures to my flickr page - check them out! They’re not incredible - it turns out I was overexposing most of my pictures today until I noticed I had a crazy shutter set… Still getting used to the new camera.

Anyway my colleague and friend Massi and I are here for some work (I’ll stay a week and a half more, and Massi leaves in a few days). Everything here is amazing - the culture is nothing like anywhere else I have been of course. I’ll probably be posting some more photos and write some more about it in the next days. The food, the clothes, the people - it’s all incredible.

Dirty, polluted - that’s true, but also incredible. It’s all very contrast in many ways.

Zend/PHP Conference 2007 is over - it was lots of fun and lots of work, and I enjoyed it even more than last year’s ZendCon. San Francisco was as beautiful as always, meeting colleagues from all over the world (some of whom I get to see only once a year) was fun, and of course, you get to learn from the smartest people of the PHP world, and also get drunk with them!
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My colleague Massi and I landed here in San Francisco yesterday after an exhausting 15 or so hours in the air (Tel-Aviv -> Frankfurt -> San Francisco). Trying to minimize the effects of jet lag (is that actually possible?) we did our best to not go to sleep and spend another 8 hours or so doing some sightseeing and just hanging around with some friends from the team (Zenders from Israel, Germany, France and the US). We also watched the Blue Angels air show that was on yesterday - it was nice, but not too exciting (after all, growing up in northern Israel I got to see enough real fighter jet action…).

Today we’ll do some more sight seeing (it’s my second time in SF, I have some family here and I really love the city). I’m staying at the conference hotel - so if you’re around, come and say hi.

My never ending journeys brought me to yet another country I’ve never been to - and this time, it’s Denmark.

I’m not in Copenhagen, but in a smaller city named Aarhus. I haven’t seen much of it yet, but hopefully I’ll at least get to hang around in the city a bit, despite not having too much time.

The only remarkable thing I’ve noticed so far was yesterday’s weather - it was frigging 23 degrees or so, and I was standing outside with short sleeves, sweating. Tel Aviv (!!) was cooler the day before I came here, and it felt really strange. As my manager described it, “something is definitely fucked up with Europe” - or maybe, as someone else put it, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”.

I went with a few guys I’m working here in Oslo with to the first meeting of the Norwegian PHP users group - although I didn’t understand much (I don’t speak Norwegian) I kind of got what was going on - and it was lots of fun.

It’s always nice to meet PHP enthusiasts and drink some beers. Derick Rethans was also there (apparently he lives in Norway) and it seemed that we were the only “foreigners” (although he does speak Norwegian quite well as far as I noticed).

There was also a PHP Quiz and we won - the prize was a bag of M&Ms which we kind of shared with everyone else - mostly because the questions were pretty much taken from the Zend Certification sample questions - so I pretty much new the answers without really understanding the questions

Pictures from the event are available - I also have a couple of pictures I might upload later during the weekend.

After something like two months at home, I went out on another journey for Zend, and this time it’s quite hectic.

I’ve spend last week road tripping the UK (I wasn’t driving thank god, but we did cover several hundreds of miles). Then, unexpectedly, I was called in for a weekend in Paris - so I took the Eurostar (first time) which was quite disappointing (maybe because it was night) and arrived at Paris on Thursday night.

It was quite nice getting back to Paris after almost 4 months of not visiting it, and our French teem seems to be getting to be quite a team, so it was quite nice - and short. Unfortunately it meant I missed spending St. Patrick’s Day in the UK - which could have been quite an event.

On Saturday evening I flew back to Heathrow to catch my original flight the next morning to Oslo - which is where I am now. I’ll be spending the next week and a half here, delivering training, and then head back to stickey-moist Tel-Aviv, and move into my new appartment.

Oslo seems to be an exciting city at first glance (most cities are!) so I hope it’ll be fun. I’ve read about the first meeting of the local PHP Norge users group on Thursday - so I might just pop in, after some sniffing around (it’s not always a good idea to barge in to these kind of meetings without asking first…)

I have to say the highlight of this trip so far was the fact that I met a new colleague in Paris, who apparently was reading my Blog without even knowing I’m the author. This means people read my Blog! Yey!