TL;DR: I’m making a move to CrowdTwist, a New York City-based startup providing social and loyalty services for some of the world’s biggest brands. I worked with their co-founder and CTO, Mike Montero, from 2001-2005 at Community Connect Inc., where I got my start as a developer in PHP and open source tools. I’m thrilled to be joining him and the CrowdTwist team on what’s sure to be an incredible adventure.

I like to do this every year. It’s a reflect and reset-type of thing for me. Here’s what I accomplished from last year’s resolutions: Published another article in php|architect magazine, SELECT * FROM Internet: An Introduction to the Yahoo! Query Language. Gave a talk on the same topic at Atlanta PHP in February. Continued to sharpen architecture and development skills. I’ve done a fair amount of work with Test-driven Development this year, which has definitely beefed up my more general design skills. Built some more iOS apps, both at work with Half Off Depot and some personal projects. Definitely have spent more time with PHP since my move to Half Off Depot. I’ll keep it short. This year, I want to:

This is the first in what I hope to be a multi-part series on using Magento. I’ve been working with it since June to run one of our core sites at Half Off Depot. During these six months, we have: Built an incredible team Had our application servers swap to disk and otherwise go belly up, on numerous occasions Moved from FastCGI back to mod_php Tuned Apache a bit to squeeze more out of our application servers Moved from a single front end webserver to multiple Introduced MySQL master-slave replication, when the slave actually in use – it’s not just a hot backup Crafted a respectable Magento application deployment process using Capistrano Cranked out some basic Magento extensions Run countless sales, built mobile apps, launched new web applications and a private API I don’t claim to be a Magento expert after only six months (far from it), but I / we have learned a lot during this time.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining Half Off Depot, LLC as Lead Software Architect on June 27th. Half Off Depot is a growing, promising startup here in Atlanta. As you might gather from the name, they’re in the daily deals space, sort of along the lines of Groupon and LivingSocial. As of this writing, they have been focusing on the Atlanta, Georgia and Knoxville, Tennessee markets. I’ll be focusing on a number of areas, both server-side and in the mobile app arena, in addition to helping build the technology team.

Better late than never, right? I should’ve done this in December, but at least it’s only two weeks into the New Year. Last year was a great year. Looking back at my 2010 resolutions, here’s what I accomplished: Learn a new language – really dove head first into learning Objective-C, along with the Cocoa and UIKit frameworks Built and released my first iOS app, FloodWatch My 2010 resolutions aside, I also managed to make a move to Yahoo!, start to hone my front end developer skills, do some Java work, learn some Hadoop and Pig scripting, learn some Lua, and speak at BarCamp Charleston. It’s been a busy year!