Paul M. Jones

By taking advantage of an asynchronous approach Starbucks also has to deal with the same challenges that asynchrony inherently brings. Take for example, correlation. Drink orders are not necessarily completed in the order they were placed. This can happen for two reasons. First, multiple baristas may be processing orders using different equipment. Blended drinks may [...]

For those of you who don’t know, “universal constructor” is the name I give to PHP constructors that always and only take a single parameter. The parameter is an array of key-value pairs, which is then merged with a set of default keys and values. Finally, the array is unmarshalled, usually into object properties.
One [...]

After a 4-month hiatus, I’m back on the job market again. If you need a web architect, expert (senior) PHP developer, or someone to manage your programming team as a leader/mentor, send me an email: pmjones88@gmail.com.

The essence of pretty code is that one can infer much about the code’s structure from a glance, without completely reading it. I call this “visual parsing”: discerning the flow and relative importance of code from its shape. Engineering such code requires a certain amount of artifice to transform otherwise working code into working, readable [...]

I just released version 1.0.1 (stable) of the Solar Framework for PHP 5. You can get it from the usual places. The change notes are here.
The most significant change is a bugfix to eager fetches in the model system. When eager conditions are present, and no join type is specified, eager fetches will use an [...]

Many thanks to the organizers and hosts of ConFoo 2010 in Montréal! It was great meeting everybody there. I always say my favorite part is talking to the attendees; that’s where most of the interesting stuff is.
I gave two talks this time around. The first was the venerable “How To Organize you PHP [...]

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)
You can see the change notes here. The highlights are:

Added [...]

This past Friday, I released verion 1.0.0beta5 of the Solar Framework for PHP. You can read the change notes here.
Overall, most of the work was related to the form helpers and making them even more flexible than they were previously. We’ve also added a new manual chapter on working with models and forms.
It [...]

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology [...]

In my regular calls with my dad, he mentioned that it seems Baby Boomers, when unhappy with their jobs, tend to do little but whine about it, whereas Gen-Xers tend to quit. I thought that observation meshed well with this insight from Peter Drucker (“The Essential Drucker“, p. 314):
But increasingly also, knowledge workers, and [...]