Christopher Jones on OPAL

On Tuesday I went to the San Francisco geekSession to hear about PHP Scalability, Performance, and the Future .  The brief talk format worked well, letting four different viewpoints be heard.  There was an all-star cast (we have many stars in the PHP world).  I heard the comment later that this geekSession had the most notebooks & pens out so far.  There were certainly some gems worth noting.  I met a bunch of people and found the evening very valuable, as well as enjoyable.

Wednesday I was at an Oracle-internal meeting where Mark Douglas of eHarmony (not a PHP site) presented on their architecture and how they use Oracle.  They migrated to Oracle a few years ago.  They actively search for new technologies to gain a competitive edge and make efficient use of that technology.  With Oracle they don't need to worry about sharding or the like - they let the DB handle that for them. With half a billion page views a month they still only need two DBAs.  In the PHP world I too often see wheels being reinvented, or the language being or used to do operations that have already been solved and are better handled elsewhere.

Today, with a different crowd again, I finally managed to make it to a Lunch 2.0.  A nice sunny day saw us on the roof top at e-Storm, "an interactive marketing and advertising company".  The attendees were a good mix of tech and business folk and it was a great (if all too brief) way to meet.  What do you do at a Lunch 2.0?  Eat lunch really.  There was a brief announcement about e-Storm's services and some fun Pleo's to pat, but the networking was the key thing. It was like the best bits of a conference without having to attend any lectures.

PS And for something that I realize in the OOW organized chaos, I didn't blog about, check out RASMUS LERDORF ENTERPRISE DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR.

PPS The next SF PHP event is the PHP Meetup on 7th February at C|NET. It's free and fun.