AKA: Mashery Recruiting at php|works

The company I had pleasure of co-founding last summer is once again on the prowl for top-notch, Zend Certified PHP developers.

We’re taking the hunt for these folks to php|works in Atlanta. Whenever possible, Mashery will be luring the quality developers with free beer.

That’s right: free beer that is free, as in beer.

We’re also sponsoring a lunch on BOTH Sept 13 and 14, as a good coder knows she cannot code on beer alone.

Show anyone from Mashery some proof that you recently took a PHP 5 Zend Certification Exam or are already PHP 5-Zend Certified, and we’ll enter your name in a drawing for a free 8GB Apple iPod Touch.

Cool, but Why Mashery?

Aside from the beer and a chance at a kick-ass iPod, why would you care about Mashery?

Well …

• Mashery is doing demanding PHP work at the bleeding edge of today’s most exciting technologies, such as mobile applications, AJAX and of course, web services.

• We work with cool tools like Amazon EC2 and S3. And we work them hard.

• Mashery’s clients represent a growing stable of very high volume web services. We tune our services to shave milliseconds off their runtime, and pound on PHP until it (occasionally) weeps.

… among other things.

After more than a year since co-founding Mashery, I can honestly say that in my ten years of working with PHP, I have never had more fun. The work is very hard, but very rewarding. And, it’s always interesting; as a “smart proxy” operator, Mashery’s engineers are constantly facing new challenges and solving them in creative ways.

Never a dull moment, as they say. That’s Mashery.

Up for it?

If you’re interested in learning more about Mashery and our unique opportunities, drop us an email at jobs@mashery.com. The job posting is here.

If you’re going to be attending php|works in Atlanta, be sure to look me up. I’ll be there with fellow co-founder Kirsten Spoljaric from Wednesday thru Friday evening. Email phpworks@mashery.com to set up a time to meet with us, or to find out about what our beer and food distribution schedule will be.

I'm really shocked by this. According to the latest Nexen.net PHP Version Survey, over 80% of the sites out there running PHP are running some flavor of PHP 4.

Why?

For those of you who missed it, PHP 5 was released almost THREE YEARS AGO. That's right ... in a couple months, we'll celebrate the 3 year anniversary of PHP 5.0.0 stable's release.

I am fully aware that there are a handful of compatibility issues between PHP 4 and PHP 5 (outlined here). I was bitten by a few of those myself when I first started porting code over to PHP 5, but none of them were major issues.

So, PHP 4-using majority: what's keeping you?

Is it your ISP that is behind the times? Your company's system administrator? Your dependency on slow-to-upgrade libraries or applications? Or something else?

Please post the reason you haven't upgraded yet in the comments below. I'd very much like to know what the resistance is to PHP 5.

I just saw this post over on PHPDeveloper.org, which refers to this scary-sounding bug relating to $_POST array behavior in PHP 5.1.3.

If you haven't upgraded yet (as I have not), it might make sense to wait this out a day or two to see what happens next. Thanks to all those who caught this and reported it.

I usually hear about this sort of thing through an announcment list or one of the PHP feeds I follow, but instead I was just pleaseantly surprised to visit the home page of php.net this evening and learn that PHP 5.1.3 is out.

Some particularly nice-looking benefits in this release include the removal of deprecation warnings for the 'var' keyword in class properties under E_STRICT, and the overhauled FastCGI interface. Of course, the most important benefits are the collection of stability refinements and bug fixes.

Timing is perfect from my perspective on the FastCGI overhaul, as I'm looking forward to really digging into the lighttpd/PHP 5 FastCGI combination this month.  I know this topic has come up before a number of times, and many people have made the switch ... so, I'm planning to give it a whirl as well. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who's already made the switch to hear if the FastCGI rewrite in PHP 5.1.3 makes a noticable performance difference.