Professional PHP developer

More than i would like to dream of, i just keep seeing companies that acquired, or developed, poorly designed solutionz in order to backup their business. This could result on business catastrophe, even the death of a great market idea.

The 3 reasons why a poorly designed solution will kill your business:

1. Deficient development pace

Development pace will, as obvious, deficient and extremely slow, due to bad designed solutions, that doesn’t follow industry standards neither language best practises.

2. Technical HR Stability

A spaghetti code monster will keep talent away from your company, because you’ll have the need to keep moving with your roadmap and most talented resources will leave, most probably due to huge frustration factors.

3. Time to market

Probably this will be the sum of the previous reasons, but will undoubtedly be the one that will help your company idea do die faster. With company instability and often small fixes there will be a spot somewhere in the time where small and quick fixes will not be acceptable any more, and the company will stop and time to market will be dead.

My advice is to hire, or at least ask advice to, industry experts mainly on the solution design or acquisition stage, this will keep your boat on a safe harbour for the next years.

Have you stepped into some poorly designed solutions ? What’s your take on it ?

Are you thinking on moving your database from a SQL implementation to a NoSQL one ?

Sometimes when you decide to move to a different approach lots of doubts pop out of your mind, there are a couple of actions that can make your decision more solid and secure. I’ll try to provide some tips that would help you to choose the right NoSQL implementation.

When do you need to think about NoSQL ?

Often web application start by being implemented on top of MySQL, the one day your application got traction and performance issues start to be a real pain due to high load of read/write queries on your system.

At this point you have 2 choices:

1. “Shard” your data to partition it across several sites
2. Go for a licensed SQL DBMS or move to  a NoSQL DBMS

Basically, you need to scale with less amount of money spent possible. Michael Stonebraker written a good article on this.

continue reading…

Recently i had a challenge where i needed to return a hyper fast response with data to the user (browser), although due to the number of operations needed to perform on database that was just not possible. So, i did some research, and remembered a technique that Bruno Pedro pointed out awhile ago.

If you play a little bit with Php and http headers you will make possible to:

1. Return data to the browser
2. Detach http server process from client (browser)
3. Keep script execution running

The solution is actually quite simple, if you refer to PHP Manual – Connection handling section, you will find a lot of examples on how to do this.

continue reading…

Following a curiosity by Claudio Franco, i will try to explain what tools do i use and what hardware do i have to support my day-by-day activity.

Computer: My old MacBook 2.16Ghz / 4 GB Ram

External monitor: Acer AL1912

Backup Drive: External Hard Drive 500 GB + Dropbox

Operating System: Mac Os Snow Leopard 10.6.3

Virtual Machines: Virtual Box Software with 1 x Debian Server (emulate production) 1x Windows 7 machine (Browser debug)

Linux Datacenter VM’s: 1 Slicehost (US) and 1 Linode (UK)

Mobile Phone: Nokia E71

Media Device: IPOD Touch 16GB

Communication/Office Tools: Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, …) , Skype

Code editor: Vim and TextMate ( The inseparables )

Am i happy with the hardware that i own ?

Definitely NO, i need urgently to upgrade my MacBook and the External Monitor is old and low quality. I haven’t choose the hardware i own in order to support my consulting activity, it’s just the hardware i had. And, until now, has been enough, with some memory performance issues from time to time.

What about fun ?

For fun i just play my Xbox 360, in this area i have no complaints.

What’s your work environment ?

Hi, long time since i have wrote some content over this blog, no excuse, just got lazy for the past 2 months, a lot of things just changed and i am adjusting myself.

4 months working from home

The past few months i shifted to a freelancer role and started working from home full-time, there are some drastic changes that you need to make in your way of living in order to adapt and keep productivity high, i will talk about it later on.

You can hire me for some freelance project now! Wanna know more about me?

Moved this blog from my us slicehost to uk linode vm

Needed more resources for some personal projects without increasing the price, so Linode was a good solution, with the bonus of having a better round trip times to Portugal.

A child on his way

A new family member is on his way, it’s a boy and i am extremely happy about it.

Open for questions

You can now ask me something over at http://www.formspring.me/iamjosedasilva, feel free to be curious.

Future writings on this blog

I am preparing a serie of articles to release on this blog, but feel free to suggest some topics you’d like to hear about.