Blog

Breaking away from the Apple Ecosystem

I've recently come to a crossroad with Apple and it's ecosystem. I've had an iPhone 4S for the last 2 years and I was itching for a new device. Giving the current iPhone lifecycle, it makes more sense to hold [...]

URL Routing with PHP

I've been taking a lot of programming tests / challenges recently as I was in the market for a new [and hopefully exciting] opportunity to spend my time on. Because of this, I am full of new blog post ideas [...]

Having a child ruins your life

I started a new contract gig this week and one of my new co-workers was very candid in letting me know that having children ruins your life and implying that I in fact had ruined my life in doing so [...]

Spending money on advertising only to acquire spammers

I performed a little experiment last year, I decided to spend a small bit of money on advertising one of my sites via AdWords. My budget was low as I didn't want to spend more than 100$ and my daily [...]

Google Places PHP Library

I tend to shy away from these self gratifying posts about my own open source contributions, but I'm going to make the exception because this particularly library has been receiving quote a few downloads this month. I'm unsure for the [...]

Linode vs. Digital Ocean, performance benchmarks

I mentioned the in my last Linode vs. Digital Ocean post that I would be doing a performance comparison of the two in the near future and here it is! I used sysbench with some pretty basic settings to compare [...]

How to Install PHP Redis on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Previously, I had shown you how to install PHP Redis from source but things changed with the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Now you can install the phpredis extension from the Ubuntu respositories. First, if you don't have it installed already [...]

Swallow your pride and stop blaming your tools

I was at my favorite neighborhood biergarten last week when I spied a flyer on the bar for the today's Cinco de Mayo event. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the kerning was set very high in between the Ma [...]

How to Install the MongoDB PHP Module on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Installing the PHP module for MongoDB on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is just a command away, but first, let's ensure that we have MongoDB itself installed: sudo apt-get install mongodb Once we have MongoDB installed, we can proceed with installing the [...]

Linode SSD vs. DigitalOcean

Time for another installment of my Linode vs. DigitalOcean series. The most notable improvement this go around is on Linode's end by offering SSD Linux servers exclusively. This had been the pain point for many as DigitalOcean has been offering [...]