Jilles’ weblog

On April 12th I presented at PFCongrez, a yearly gathering of PHPFreakz. During the day three other presentations were given. The first one was by Peter-Paul Koch (ppk for short) who presented about unobtrusive javascript. The presentation was given with a lot of energy, enjoyable!

After that, I presented a sneak peak at Marktplaats during which I gave some insight into what it takes to run one of the biggest sites of the Netherlands. It goes into some of the high level production setup, highlights some of the challenges of operating hundreds of database deployments and goes into some of the aspects Marktplaats runs into while using PHP.

The slides are embedded below, or up for download here. Or join the after party discussion.

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The other presentations during the day that can be found online:

• Peter Paul Kock, Unobstrusive Javascript
• Stefan Koopmanschap, Symfony

Next to that, I am trying to gauge any interest in our tool to manage database schema’s: DBC. It keeps database schema’s in synch with your application, and allows developers to branch off the database schema much as a version control system allows you to do with your code. If you are interested in this tool, please contact me at “jilles &at& marktplaats . nl”. We are looking to see if there is enough interest to open source the tool.

I have lost my copy of “Godel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter, so I bought a new one which I intent to reread. When I first read it in 2003, I had this amazing feeling afterwards but could not quite attribute it to certain elements and topics in the book. The book as a whole has a lot of qualities, but this time I’m going to keep a little log on what resonates with me. I will try to write those down here for future reference.