This week, there was another webtuesday with lightning talks in Zürich. Leo and I each did a little talk:

“StubidDB” by Leo

Leo still dreaming about dumber databases. His own creation StupidDB might sound familiar to you…

“I’m in Ur Browzerz…” by Maarten

Harry had the idea to locate your users based on their history. I tried it out, giving another 8 minutes of fame to an old and well-known hack. The slides can be found here.

All I needed to do was renaming Trevi_Auth to Tilllate_Auth. Sure, it affected some 41 files, but that’s nothing a little bit of search & replace can’t do. The big headache started when I ran the unit tests.

Shuffle Unit Tests = Fail.

It’s absolutely amazing how much you can mess up unit tests just by changing their order! (Trevi_* comes after Tilllate_*) Everyone knows that tests are supposed to be independent. But we all know how it is. People get lazy, mocks are complicated and testing is boring anyway. And don’t forget about that cool pattern called “Singleton” that we’ve all read about in an inflight magazine!

Punish Me!

Obviously we can’t do testing right without getting beaten with a stick. So where’s that stick? Is there a way to reset all static variables in PHP? Is there a PHPUnit hack that forks a separate PHP process for each test?

What is your solution to keep your tests from sticking together like spit ? I’m happy to learn about it!

A refreshing change from my daily routine as tilllate CTO (90% meeting, 10% coding) was my visit at the first Webtuesday Hackday yesterday (Hackday = “a day spent hacking with like minds”, as organizer Harry Fuecks defines it).

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After a day of speaking about about memcached, squid and sharding at the tilllate offices, Peter was still fresh enough to hold a talk about Advanced MySQL Query Optimization for the Webtuesday (notably on a Wednesday).

Even though we announced the talk just three days ago I’ve never seen the room at namics packed so much. Even the Ruby guys around Tristan cancelled their Höck and joined us! No surprise: Peter is well known through his Mysql Performance Blog.

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Busy week for the open source IT pros around Zürich: On Thursday Vint Cerf will talk at Google. On Wednesday, Nov 21st tilllate is happy to announce a presentation of Peter Zaitsev of the MySQL Performance Blog. He will talk about query optimization for high traffic sites.

Peter Zaitsev was manager of the High Performance Group at MySQL Inc. He specializes in MySQL Server performance as well as in performance of application stacks using MySQL, especially LAMP. Web sites handling millions of visitors a day dealing with terabytes of data and hundreds of servers is king of applications he loves the most.
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