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A freelance web design business was my first venture and I made many mistakes that eventually resulted in the loss my business. In this post, I try to highlight what I did wrong and hopefully help you avoid the same mistakes. Despite the title, this post applies to anyone starting out on their own - not only freelance designers or developers.
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Being a PHP developer is so much more than writing PHP code. A PHP professional is part developer, part scientist, part salesperson and part garbage collector. Here are five skills that, while not strictly about PHP, will make your chances of landing that PHP job much higher.
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I was going to use the adjective essential in the title rather than useful but no one book is essential when it comes to learning web design. There are thousands of online tutorials to help you master the profession and there are dozens if not hundreds of books on all aspects of web-based creativity. Not having access to any one book will stop you from learning your desired skill but some books w
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I think everyone I know online has a great idea for a web application or website with some functionality behind it. We all believe that we have that one killer idea that if only we had the time to get it done would make us millionaires. Looking at some of the successful startups in the past, it’s amazing how often one thinks that they could’ve created it just as easily.
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Some recent attention in the PHP framework community has been focused on the recent publication of Symfony 2 Preview benchmarks showing that Symfony 2 outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 3.5. It also outperforms every other benchmarked framework. This reminded me of the earlier Yii Framework benchmarks which allegedly proved that Yii outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 7. At this poin
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This is the first installment of a series of blog post called the WIMPinator Chronicles that describe how to setup a PHP development environment for Windows 7 and IIS 7.5.
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I’ve been tweeting quite a bit about MongoDB over the past few weeks and its time to blog.
About 2 months ago we decided to install and mess around with MongoDB. We went from messing around to serious adoption about 2 weeks ago when we realized the power of working with it and PHP. It was Mitch Pirtle of www.spacemonkeylabs.com that first pointed us in this direction. Mitch was very enthusiastic
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Jim Campigli talks about making subversion agile in a distributed environment and the tools that WANdisco can offer.
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With the release of Facebook HipHop PHP compiler, the matters of performance of PHP compilers and runtime engines gained special relevance.
This article presents a performance comparison of between different PHP compilers and runtime PHP execution engines, so we can evaluate what is the best solution that can be used in different PHP environments.
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After the PHP Best Practices in Performance Part 1 and Part 2, here’s the last post from the series:
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We were discussing the difficulty of the hiring process from a company point of view last week at the github meetup in Paris, and more specifically how hard it is to get quality people without relying on test assignments, which most agree are total bullshit, or on a couple of interviews, which can also be very misleading since it depends a lot on the person's social skills, or lack thereof.
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Facebook announced their open source project HipHop PHP yesterday and the web development community has been in a whirlwind of discussion about what this means, particularly for the PHP community.
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Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framewor
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Late last year The Economist magazine came out with an update to their special report on social networking. One of their earlier predictions that had been proved wrong (so far) was that, rather than users joining more and more niche networks, the larger players in social networking had increased their memberships
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Every programmer should learn a new programming language once in a while. Be it for inspiration or just for fun. After some homework in C# some years ago and quite some Java at university (again), Python was my language of choice. This is the first article in a series I plan to write about what I like in Python, what is disturbing but works out and what is really evil. In this article I give a sh
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If you're having problems with server load due to high volume of traffic you can try getting fast cheap web hosting for your sites. Although web hosting is part of the solution you also need to consider other bandwidth heavy website applications.
