I’m looking for a PHP developer to fill a permanent web team lead developer & team leader role, based in Bath in the UK. The role is with Gradwell, a multi-award winning provider of business internet services (we’re also one of the top 50 fastest growing UK tech companies according to Deloitte), reporting directly to me in the Engineering department. We have some exciting projects (including a public-facing API) to deliver and the usual challenges of morphing legacy code to solve.
If you’re interested, drop me a line at the office (stuart.herbert at gradwell dot com) to get more details and explain why you’d be worth an interview :)
No agencies, thanks.
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By now, you might have heard the details of HipHop, Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ convertor that was announced yesterday. Like most of you, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the code so that I can play with it and learn in detail what it can do and what it can’t. For now, Marco’s post seems to have the most technical information in it so far.
I’m with Sebastian on this one. Whether or not you think Facebook’s HipHop is relevant to you, I think they deserve credit for having shared their particular solution with the wider community. (They’ll get extra credit when they actually release some code :) ) After all, they’ve built on top of open-source in the first place; giving something back to the community is part and parcel of being a good member of the community.
How many of you earn your living from open-source, but have never contributed anything back?
But that isn’t really what I want to blog about today.
I’ve been following the chat on Twitter about HipHop, and I think all the nay sayers have been overlooking an important point. HipHop has the potential to reduce the amount of power consumed in running a website. And surely that can only be a good thing for all of us?
If you don’t run your own servers in a data centre (for example you use a virtual server, or host on a shared hosting solution), then perhaps you might not be aware that the power required by each server in a rack is often a major factor in the overall cost of running the servers. Whether or not you believe in climate change, energy prices are on the rise. Whether or not you believe in peak oil, oil and natural gas supply issues are forecast to push energy prices up further. Taking steps to get more work done per unit of power consumed has been the focus of hardware manufacturers for several years now. Isn’t it time it also was the focus of the software community too?
CPU usage is only one aspect of the total power consumed by a server in a rack, but in my experience people tend to add more servers to their solution primarily because they need more CPUs running their web servers to handle more traffic. A reduction in the number of CPUs required will translate into a reduction of the number of servers required … which means a reduction in the amount of energy being consumed.
How can that not be a good thing, if it can be achieved?
I know the answer will be that PHP apps are not CPU-bound, that they spend much of their time waiting for results from the database. That might be true if you’re measuring a PHP app from the point of view of elapsed time, but what if you’re measuring the PHP app in terms of CPU cycles consumed? Every single PHP script has to run on a CPU, and has to get to the point where it’s sat waiting for the database. If HipHop means that each PHP script uses less CPU to get to the same point, that has to be a step in the right direction.
Until we can play with HipHop ourselves, it’s impossible to say whether it saves enough CPU cycles to allow us to use less CPUs and therefore less servers. Remember, you’ve still got the overhead of your operating system and web server to factor into the equation. And then there’s the energy cost of compiling your code in the first place during development; for seldom-visited websites, HipHop may increase overall energy requirements.
But it sure is nice to hope, isn’t it?
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Stuart is running a course in Manchester in October immediately before the PHPNW09 conference on how to setup and organise your PHP developers to ensure things run smoothly for you and your customers, which will include looking at how to get the most out of Trac. Learn more about the course, or sign-up now.
When it’s just you, working on one project at a time, it’s easy enough to keep track of the work you’re doing and the work you still need to do to complete the job. Chances are you can keep it all in your head, or at least keep the discussions with your customer on something like Basecamp in your head. You know that you should be using source control and bug tracking because it is “best practice”, but it just seems like too much of an overhead to bother with when it’s just you. After all, you’re working on the customer’s server, and there’s no-one else editing the code anyway.
Some of the folks reading this blog post might be cringing at that, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come across professional PHP developers who work in exactly this way. Is it because they don’t know better? Maybe. Is it because it has worked okay for them up to now? For sure.
But eventually, there comes a point where one developer becomes a team of two … or more. Having a team means that you can go after larger projects … but it also means that you have to go after larger projects to pay the team. Larger projects mean more complicated requirements, multiple phased deliveries … and a larger, more demanding (and probably a more complicated) customer holding the pay cheque.
Running a team of PHP developers (like all management activity in all walks of life) comes down to three key things: direction, organisation, and supervision. Only now it isn’t just you and a customer, just a list that you can keep in your head. Now you need to keep track of a larger list, of multiple lists for multiple people to work on that need to be brought together in the end, and if anything slips through the cracks it’s your reputation on the line. Getting the customer to come back for repeat business just got a lot less easy to take for granted.
Trac and Subversion have been part of our community’s toolkit for many years now. Used correctly, you can get yourself and your customers well-organised, and grow your reputation when you grow your team. If you haven’t started using them yet, both are open-source, and well-backed with plenty of information freely available around the blogosphere on how to use them.
Or join me in Manchester in early October, where I’ll show you how they fit into an overall approach to running your team of PHP developers.
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Came across a second Microsoft-sponsored competition aimed at showcasing PHP on Windows. This one is for Canadian residents, and is headlined ‘The Ultimate Coder Battle‘. The premise is quite interesting: one student and one professional developer will be the chosen finalists, and they will battle head to head at the “Make Web Not War” conference. The winner walks away with substantial cash prizes – $5000 with another $5000 in bonus awards available. Entries close 3rd June.
After many many years of pushing ASP and ASP.net, I’m finding it fascinating to watch Microsoft push Windows as a viable platform for publishing PHP applications. Although PHP apps on Windows have been viable for many years (provided you ditched the fundamentally-flawed ISAPI approach and stuck with the slower-but-stable CGI route), I think it’s great to see the improvements that are being made both to PHP and IIS. From personal experience, I know it can be very difficult to sell PHP-based apps into organisations that choose Windows; being able to point at Microsoft’s support for PHP is a good thing for the ISV community.
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I’m currently looking for two PHP developers to come and join my web development team at Gradwell. The team creates and maintains the web-based control panels for our award-winning VoIP service, plus our broadband, email, and web hosting services. From time to time we also get to do crazy things like Twittex and Facebook applications. Our partners often describe us as the geekiest company they ever have to deal with. And one nice bonus is that we use Linux for our desktops not Windows :)
The full details are on the Gradwell website, but the basics are that I’m looking for people with a computer science / software engineering degree, with PHP experience (via open-source projects is fine; it doesn’t have to be commercial experience), and experience with symfony is a major plus. It’s essential that you fit in with everyone else in the company, so you’ll need to be someone who’s proactive but supportive rather than competitive.
If you’re interested in applying, talk to me on Twitter or send through a CV and covering letter explaining why you’re the person for the role to stuart(dot)herbert at gradwell(dot)com.
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