Kevin Haynes

Site Performance Optimization

2010-08-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

After attending the Velocity Conference a couple months back, we have been focusing a lot of attention of optimizing our page rendering and load times.

Some tools we've started leveraging are:

WebPageTest

Show Slow

HTTP Watch

GTMetrix

mysqldumpslow

2010-03-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

Just another post for me to be able to track down a command that comes in handy a lot.

mysqldumpslow -t 10 –s t /path/to/slow/log

Parse apache log for page requests that trigger 500 error

2010-02-10T14:28:00.001-08:00

Posting this so I don't need to remember how to get this info.

To parse an apache log for the requests that are status code 500 (internal server error):

'cat /path/to/access/log/file' | awk '{print $7, $9}' | grep ' 500'

Provides output like:

/blah/xyz.php 500
/bleh/abc.php 500
/xxx/yyy.php 500

Capture Time to First Byte using curl

2010-01-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

Posting this so I don't have to remember where to search for it.

http://www.pinoytux.com/linux/capture-time-to-first-byte-using-curl

"Googled: The End of the World as We Know It"

2009-11-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

The chances of me ever finishing a book these days are nil. Therefore, I just bought the CD version of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

mysqltuner.pl

2009-10-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Tim Hawkins, our new Director of App Dev in our Pasig office, for turning us on to mysqltuner.pl.

The tool helped us immediately diagnose the following issues on one of our top e-commerce sites:

[!!] Maximum possible memory usage
[!!] Query cache prunes per day
[!!] Joins performed without indexes

2009 Zend Conference kick-off

2009-10-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am in San Jose, CA, for the 2009 Zend Conference. Today is the Tutorials day. I attended the "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects". I wasn't very impressed. They glossed over Selenium and stumbled through the PHPUnit demo.

I'm now in the "PHP Code Review" tutorial. I thought it would be about how to perform code reviews, but instead the speakers are picking apart the code in Open Source PHP projects. Not sure how much value I'll be getting out of this.

Hiring Filipino PHP developers in the Philippines

2008-03-02T02:37:00.001-08:00

I am currently in Manila, Philippines, to expand our Philippines PHP developer team. Should there be any readers of my blog that are a PHP developer or know PHP developers in the Philippines, please contact me at kevin@usautoparts.com

Note: I apologize to all the Zend Certified Engineers in the Philippines that received the following spam via the Zend Yellow Pages' Private Message feature. When trying to recruit talented people, you need to be resourceful. ;-)

"Since you are a member of the PHP community in the Philippines, I wanted to bring to your attention that my company, US Auto Parts/MBS Tek, is looking to expand its Philippine PHP development team.

We're looking for senior and junior level positions such as Solutions Architects, Software Development Leads and Web Application Developers.

We offer a competitive salary, great benefits and a fun work environment. There's even a foosball table in the break room. :)

You can view the ad at
http://ph.jobstreet.com/jobs/2008/2/default/20/1767437.htm

If you meet the requirements and are interested, please reply to me at kevin@usautoparts.com. I am currently in the Philippines to expand the development team."

And yes, it is true there's a foosball table in the break room. My personal preference is ping pong, so I'm going to see how much pull I have and try to get one purchased.

Here's to crossing my fingers that Google picks this blog entry up as relevant for search phrases such as "philippines php developer". :-)

Congrats Fanfare team

2008-02-10T10:06:00.001-08:00

Congrats to the Schematic team that developed SanDisk's FanFare site and product UI. Check out how cool that Flash app is!

The architecture of FanFare was one of the last projects I worked on before leaving Schematic and am very proud of the team for pulling off such a great feat.

Zend Conference 2007 Slides ... just like being there (sort of)

2007-11-04T07:01:00.001-08:00

I did not attend this year's Zend Conference due to the scheduled birth of my son right around the same time.

I spent a few hours over the October 20th and 21st weekend tracking down slides from the conference. Imagine how I felt about losing those few hours when I saw that Cal Evans from the Zend Developer Zone did all the work for me.

[Link: Zend Conference 2007 Slides]

[Tags: php, zend, zend conference]

Great 'How to Interview Programmers' article

2007-11-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

In refreshing my programmer interview skills this week, I came across this great article that I had found a couple of years ago.

[Link: How to Interview a Programmer]

Clever Carving ... The PHPumpkin

2007-10-28T08:10:00.001-07:00

A colleague of mine, Brian DeShong, from my former employer, Schematic, has carved the PHP logo into a pumpkin in celebration of PHP and Halloween.

Great job Brian!

[Link: Behold…the PHPumpkin!]

[Tags: php]

PHP Zend Certification

2007-08-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

Zend has finally associated both of my PHP 4 and PHP 5 Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) Certifications to my account in their Zend PHP Yellow Pages.

SMS through email

2007-08-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

I was setting up some reminders in Yahoo to email my wife about our daughter's soccer practice and needed to figure out how to send reminders to her to phone.

After a google search, I found a page with SMS email domains

T-Mobile:phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile:phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular:phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint:phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com