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Valuable Lessons, Celebrations and Philosophy

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Timing Is Everything Part 2

I spoke to Matt M. recently, and there were some really key things to his story that I picked up on:

  1. Wordpress is three years old, and it started as a fork of b2.  It took several months before Matt could say that anyone other than himself was using it.
  2. The 1.0 release of Wordpress came out about two weeks after Six Apart announced a new license and business model for Moveable Type.
  3. Matt left CNET to start Automattic about a year ago, and the company is now 8 (or so) deep with no office to date.

Suddenly I’m inspired to use my WordPress blog again.  Cheers Matt, for a musician turned hacker, you’ve done well in three years.

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31 July 2006 comments [2] TrackBack-URI

How many technologies can you spew?

I’m finding myself in more and more situations and conversations where people are using more technologies than necessary to get a simple job accomplished.  Java, Perl, PHP, Shell Scripts, Ruby.  Good gracious.

MySpace was done in ColdFusion on the first go around.  As much as I like to make fun of ColdFusion, man.. the language can get some stuff done quickly with those tags.  And certainly it has a shorter learning curve than PHP (we won’t even go their with Ruby) for the HTML designer.  An old acquaintence of mine created a User Mode Linux hosting service with Linux and Cold Fusion.  I remember thinking he was kind of crazy, especially since I knew that he could do Java pretty well.  But now I understand a little bit better.  He was about the business of making his application work, and he felt he had the best chance of doing it with CF.

For me, this choice is almost always going to be PHP.  I have yet to see a strong case that would make me move away from that which I am strongest and most effective in.  It has nothing to do with thinking PHP is the best language.  It’s just the one that you should pay me to code in.  Any online business I do will include PHP, at least for the foreseeable future.  I don’t get my jollies by spewing acronyms and buzzwords off, well… it’s sometimes fun on the podcast.

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31 July 2006 comments [2] TrackBack-URI

Pretty Excited

Many are enjoying the splendor of OSCON 2006, and while I am with them in spirit, I am glad I didn’t signup to go this year because Jessica had surgery on Monday and I’m pretty much running the ship at home this week. She’s fine, had a hernia, got it taken care of.

Anyway, I’m excited because I’ll be speaking with Matt Mullenweg on Friday on the podcast. I think Matt is in many ways an embodiment of what PHP and the web is all about. He has managed to focus on making software that everyone can use, not that programmers respect because it’s “uber cool”, although, I think he has achieved a great deal of respect amongst his peers. The result of this focus is obvious. Wordpress is the most popular opensource blog software, period. And that’s saying alot considering how long Movable Type was out before it.

I hope you all will sign up and join the conversation with Matt on Friday at 1PM EST. It will be a treat to hear from the man about how PHP has worked for him.

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26 July 2006 comment TrackBack-URI

Stop the Zend bashing… it’s old.

Look. These magazines are looking to find buzz words and noticable companies to create an eye catching story. I’m sorry but PHP as the leading web technology is old news. And PHP as an open source success is also old news. We in the community should mature enough to recognize that and continue on with the business of making PHP everything it can be. Unless you are in the business of competing with Zend, what do you care if an article looks a little bit like corporate PR speak on Zend’s behalf. It’s furthering that whole “enterprise” thing that underpaid PHP programmers (with the exception of the Yahoo, OmniTI and other fortunate peeps) have been saying they want. Respect and adequate compensation will come when hiring managers take it more seriously, and I think that article did more good than bad. I can’t say the same for this rant, which clearly causes more division in the PHP community. They’ve done a lot for the language, and while some of the PR in years past was clearly out of line (the timeline of PHP and “Creators” schtick comes to mind), that policy has been changed and they are working on improving community relations.

So please, spare me the Zend rants unless they are confirmed and legitimate. It’s a waste of my brain space.

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