This weekend, I attended iPhone/Mobile Camp Atlanta at the King Plow Arts Center. It was great to meet some new, non-PHP-specific faces in the southern iPhone and mobile communities. The crowd seemed to be quite tech-heavy, rather than business-heavy. As such, I learned some new things such as how to handle analytics on the iPhone (use Flurry), how to reduce latency when using Core Audio, and some new-to-me information on parsing XML on the iPhone.

Update, December 2021: this book is a great reference on all things MySQL performance: Recently I’ve been focusing on MySQL replication for a project at work. On this particular project, I’m acting in a Solutions Architect role and have been since about September of 2008. Because of my background in systems administration, I tend to get myself into situations where I become the Schematic-side sys admin on projects. This involves things like deployment processes, getting development, staging, and production environments setup, and now, setting up MySQL replication. This is probably because a) I’m probably bad at delegating these things to others, b) I’m kinda’ good at it, and c) let’s be honest, I’m a control freak, so I like knowing the servers hosting my apps are setup in a meticulous manner.

I write a lot of unit tests. I like to apply our coding standards, which are based on Zend Framework coding standards, to these test classes. I also hate writing the skeleton test classes from scratch, especially with PHPUnit will do this for me. You just have to run: phpunit --skeleton-test Your\_Class …and it generates: PHPUnit x.y.z by Sebastian Bergmann. Wrote skeleton for "Your\_Class" to "./Your\_ClassTest.php". Fresh off of the skeleton generation, the test class will have a few little things in it that are against Zend Framework standards. The Vim map below fixes these standards violations:

One of my accomplishments during 2008 was preparing and presenting a new talk, “Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools”. This talk focused on some of the challenges with delivering content to mobile device users, such as limited bandwidth, limited resources on the device, and varying device support for video and audio formats. It illustrated how to use tools such as the imagick extension and FFmpeg to deliver content and an experience that was optimized for mobile devices.

I’ll be giving a “mini-talk” on the Factory Method pattern at Atlanta PHP this evening. Who doesn’t love the Factory Method pattern, right? Good stuff. A link to a PDF of the slides is below. I struggled to come up with a cool example, but an one related to cars was the best that I could do. You’ll find some PHP-specific example code in the slides, too. Grab the slides (PDF) For further reading on the Factory Method pattern and other classic design patterns, you can always grab a copy of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Enjoy!