As many of you know, Helgi Thormar and I have been exchanging with Microsoft for a while now trying to give what we can in order to help them improve their open source approaches and ideas.

Last summer we were invited to Seattle for the Microsoft Web Developer Summit (Which was a blast thanks to Microsoft) and as soon as we came back to Europe, I got a call from Yuri from Microsoft who wanted to organize some kind of workshop/camp/developer summit for European developers and Microsoft altogether. (more…)

This is an UPDATE post by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who has been with us for the past week on work experience. (Original post here)

Well, I’ve been working on my project for the week and here’s the update that you were promised! (And stick with the post, there’s a live demo!) I haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped but I have learnt a lot whilst here. See the previous post for more on that and what I had planned.

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This post is by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who is with us for a week on work experience.

Hello! The guys here at echolibre thought that making a web app would be the best way for me to experience working in this industry, so I am. The idea that I’ve come up with and started this week is, as Eamon put it, a document management system for schools, teachers & students.  Here’s just a quick overview of what I want to do with the project and I’d love to hear what you think about it or any ideas you have — so if you want to, just throw me a comment below! (more…)

A very short post on a Friday afternoon.

This is an open invite to anyone who works on the web, be it as a designer or developer, a startup entrepreneur or in social media.

Our door is always open for coffee, wifi and shop-talk

We’re based here on Dame St., just drop me an email - eamon@echolibre.com

After many days of speculations all around the web about Facebook’s rewrite of PHP, today Haiping Zhao from the Facebook team has announced “HipHop for PHP”. The basic idea of HipHop for PHP is that it turns the code you write in PHP into C++ which then can be turned into machine code.

Even though there are others idea that have tried accomplishing the same goal as HipHop for PHP, I believe it is quite safe to assume that Facebook has a large enough user-base to produce code that is solid enough to run and can run well.

The announcement has been made on the Facebook blog earlier today, and tonight there is going to be the video tech talk that everybody can watch:

This evening we’re hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you’d like to watch.

A few questions come to mind even though we haven’t seen the code just yet. My main concern though is the one of buffer overflows and the security implications of turning PHP code into C++. As they say on the blog, it took nearly 18 months before having a relatively stable version and 3 developers. This is a very short lapse of time to develop a solution used by so many.

Another interest of mine related to this release is how does it compete with the likes of phc or roadsend php. If it does at all.

However I have noticed on their blog that Facebook has also developed HPHPi which seems to let you use HipHop but without having to actually compile your code before running it (The concept seems a bit like APC’s stat on and off switch from the few lines of description), which seems like a quite interesting idea for the development stages.

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains. (more…)

This year, David Coallier and my self were invited to attend the annual Microsoft Web Developers Summit, or WDS for short. For David this was his first time there but for me it was a 3rd year running, and as ever I was excited like a kid in a candy shop.

What is WDS? In short, it’s a summit where Microsoft invites a selective few (roughly 25 people) from the PHP community, during which they basically ask the attendees questions, show case a few new features to get feedback on and utilize the time to help figure out how Microsoft can better serve the PHP community at large. These people tend to be various leaders of either community sites or big open source projects and will thus have a lot of insight into how people use their software on Microsoft platforms and the problems they have. (more…)

Helgi, our lead on R&D has just been published on this years PHP Advent. In this article he looks at how web designers and developers currently interact, and offers some ways to improve the web design and development process.

The full post can be found here.

Anyone that goes to conferences knows that it’s nearly always the same people speaking. This is not bad, but this world is vast and the potential amount of decent speakers with very interesting subject and even more knowledgeable ideas is even greater.

In an attempt to identify the reasons why the speakers presence is so repetitive, I nailed it down to the diffidence factor. Today we were discussing about the community on IRC and the issue of low amount of new speakers came up again. So I’m bringing the idea back up to the surface

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Last week our very own Helgi was at ZendCon in San José, California. He was there as a speaker to talk about Frontend Caching and “PEAR2 and Pyrus”

The first talk I gave was about frontend caching and how you can get the most speed out of your website by optimizing the various bits of the frontend.

Make sure to catch “The aftermath” on Helgi’s blog as you may get a better idea of what we do in conferences and what happens in general!