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  • mindjuju 10:33 on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    MySQL Forks: Which One Is Right For Me? 

    I’ve got to admit, i didn’t even know there were forks to mysql, but in discussing the matter with Steve Meyers, I can understand better what he means when he says : if you’re not using a mysql fork, you have no idea what you’re missing out on.

    For our June meeting, Steve will be discussing the benefits of Oracle MySQL, Drizzle, Percona Server, and MariaDB. Don’t forget that we’re at out new location: Center 7 in Bluffdale.

    A little about Steven:

    I started out as a developer at Omniture (known as MyComputer.com back then, among other names) from 1998 to 2001. I was the Chief Architect, involved in all new code and database design. I then worked for MingleMatch (bought by Spark Networks in 2005) from 2001 to 2009. For a while, I was the entire Development and IT department. As we hired more employees, I transitioned into a full-time IT management role, while still maintaining a close relationship with the Development group. I left there in 2009, and began working for CrimeReports.com in a similar role. I left in January 2011 to pursue my own businesses. Since 2001, I have been running CougarBoard.com, a community of BYU sports fans. I wrote the site from scratch, although it uses a few external libraries.

    Over the years, I have become fairly proficient with PHP and MySQL. My understanding of the system as well as programming side of things has helped me to optimize SQL, PHP, and general web serving.

     

  • mindjuju 19:05 on Thursday, 8 April 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Anatomy of a PHP Request 

    For our April meeting, Joseph Scott will be presenting on the Anatomy of a PHP request. Continuing our series for beginners, we have Justin Carmony presenting on PHP Fundamentals.

    Ever wondered what really happens when your PHP script runs? Justin cover the major milestones in the life and times of a PHP request (read, parse, compile, execute, output ) and where to look for road bumps along the way. There are lots of tools available to make your PHP purr like a kitten, so I’ll dive into op code caches (with APC),
    op code dumps (with VLD – Vulcan Logic Dumper), and profiling (with Xdebug and webgrind). It will be a great time digging a little deeper in to PHP!

    Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife and children. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything. Joseph joined Automattic in 2007, where he focuses on WordPress APIs (XML-RPC/AtomPub), realtime-ish updates (rssCloud/PuSH), WordPress.org themes and stats, and likes to dabble in front and back end
    performance hacks.

     

  • mindjuju 17:12 on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP 

    For our March meeting, Cal Evans will present on “5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP.” It will be excellent for all audiences! We’re going to do things special for this one meeting: our presenter isn’t going to be with us live. We are still going to be meeting at Bill Good Marketing as usual (and afterhours party as usual), but will be presenting to us via GotoWebinar.

    5 Things I wish they had told me before I started programming in PHP is a raucous romp through PHP, covering not only mistakes that programmers make, but skills they need to make sure they master.

    1. Learn a framework. I don’t care if you didn’t write it, you’re not (insert demigod programmer here) so quit thinking you’ve got it figured out. Frameworks exist for a reason and that reason it to give you the tools you need to do your job. If you are a carpenter, you don’t go out and build your own circular saw before you start a project, you use one already built. We will review the 5 most popular PHP frameworks.
    2. Learn that PHP is not (insert the language you last worked in). More importantly, we don’t want it to be either. PHP is what it is, the best solution for web project. The faster you learn that, the faster you will get things done. PHP is unique and proud of it.
    3. Learn where to get help. Help sites for PHP abound on the web. Anyone with a copy of WordPress can start sharing the things that they’ve learned. Unfortunately, not all sites are created equally. If you are new to PHP, look to sites like phpdeveloper.org and DevZone as pointers to other good content. If you are an old hand, here are a few sites you may not know about that will help you get going.
    4. Learn your stack. LAMP, WAMP, SAMP MAMP, or WIMP know the stack you are using inside and out. We’ll cover the basics you have to know, from setting up a virtual domain, directory structure stratigies to url re-writing and logging. We will look at a few offerings including Zend Server.
    5. Get Involved! Getting involved in the community is not somethng you do because you are bored on a friday night. it’s something you do because you want to know more than the guy sitting in the cube next to you. You can either spend every night reading and memorizing the PHP manual, or you can get involved in the community and start talking with the people white the language. Theya re out there, they don’t usually bite and they will help you as long as you don’t expect them to do your job for you. The next time you boss asks you about the new Date() features in PHP 5.3, you can reply “Let me ask Derick real quick.”

    For the past 8 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of “management by wandering around”. These days, when not working with PHP, Cal can be found working on a variety of projects, most of which require a higher security clearance than you have so they can’t be listed here. Cal is currently based in Nashville TN where he is currently gainfully unemployed and seeking a job in IT so he doesn’t have to go out and get a real job. Cal is happily married to wife 1.25, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.

    .

     

  • mindjuju 15:47 on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Cookies, sessions, business, and stackable.com 

    For our February meeting, Daniel Crookston will give a mini presentation on sales techniques, Justin Carmony will present on cookies and sessions, and Xmission will give a special presentation on stackable.com.

    mainPresentation – Sales 101: The Basics – Daniel Crookston
    An overview of a handful of simple sales techniques you can use to schedule more sales calls, win more contracts, and ultimately earn more money. The skills we’ll be focusing on include turning a cold call (whether incoming or outgoing) into an appointment, helping the people you meet with to feel comfortable giving you their business, and negotiating for a better price once they have agreed to purchase your services.

    phpFundamentals presentation – Cookies & Sessions in PHP.
    For this month’s beginners PHP presentation, the topic will be Cookies & Sessions in PHP. The purpose of Cookies and Sessions and where to implement them into your website. We’ll cover how to use them, as well as some common mistakes that new developers can make.
    Presented by Justin Carmony

    specialPresentation – Stackable.com
    Xmission will be coming out to present to us on what stackable.com is and how it works for you. They will be answering your questions.

    About the Main Presenter:

    Dan has been programming since he was very young, and programmed professionally for 7 years in PHP. He realized pretty quickly that sales was going to be a big part of being successful, so he took some sales classes and did a lot of studying.
    Recently he took a full time sales position to get more experience in a sales-only environment and to have an opportunity to learn from people who sell full time.

     

  • mindjuju 10:09 on Monday, 18 January 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    A new year, a new start, and a new way to do things 

    Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are
    restructuring the way our meetings will be.

    New Meeting Structure

    We will be splitting our PHP meetings into 2 parts. First part is basic skills / best practices training. This is for you new guys who want to learn, but don’t know where to start. This section is called PHP fundamentals and will be hosted by Justin Carmony. He and I are working on some printed materials and are ramping this up as we speak. We also have several very senior and tenured members who are VERY friendly to questions. The second portion of our meeting will be a more advanced topic that will be of benefit to intermediate / advanced members, but will still be of great benefit to those who are new.

    Still Social!

    For those interested in the social aspect of our meeting, we still have the famous UPHPU Afterhours party.

    Resources

    As far as learning resources, Ray Hunter and I are working on having books available at our meetings. While we will have some fun / zany way of handing out the books, there is an understood condition of receiving the book. You MUST write a review of the book and post it online. If you don’t want to write a review, don’t take the book. I will be breaking arms on this!

    Online Resources

    I know that our recordings have been sporadic. i’m working on allocating more time to this.

     

  • mindjuju 8:38 on Monday, 16 November 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Methods for Mockups: A Geek’s Guide to Design 

    For our November meeting, Velda Harper Christensen will present on fundamental concepts that won’t replace your designer, but will help bridge the gap between logic and aesthetics. Velda is a designer, blogger, mother, geek, and full-time student. As usually, after hours party to follow!

    We are also running a tech book drive to assist those who are just starting to learn web programming! You and I both know you’re not using those HTML books anymore! bring them in and let somebody else benefit from something collecting dust on your shelf! Bring in what you can, HTML, JavaScript, etc, I promise it’ll go to good use.

     

  • mindjuju 8:55 on Monday, 14 September 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    CSS live coding demonstration 

    For our September meeting, our founder, Wade Shearer will present on front-end web development, specifically focusing on markup, styles, and foundation architectural structures. The presentation will be a live coding demonstration developing a global site template using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. He will take an audience-submitted design and produce production-ready code and site assets as far as time and questions will allow. Attendees interested in submitting a design should come to the meeting prepared with a digital copy of artwork for a website or web application (layered Photoshop file preferably). The design used will be selected randomly from those in attendance. A basic understanding of web technology and coding is recommended.

    Wade Shearer is a professional graphic artist, interaction designer, and software engineer. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s Visual Arts College and an active member of local communities advocating and supporting the arts, computing, and internet technologies. He is the founder and administrator of the Utah PHP Users Group, the Utah Apple Users Group, and the Utah Graphic Artists Forum. You can also find him publishing in the online journals North Temple and Utah Preppers.

    Wade is an avid outdoorsman, gardner, and cyclist. He is currently employed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints where he works as a senior interaction designer and user advocate for custom web application development. Previous employment includes Senior Manager of Interactive Marketing and Operations at Omniture, Creative Director at Doba, and Interaction Designer at 3Form. He also consults for clients, offering services such as identity development, brand management, art direction, campaign and collateral design, environmental graphics, and interior design.

     

  • mindjuju 13:35 on Monday, 13 July 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security 

    For our July meeting, Josh Fenio will present on A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security. The presentation will track the day to day aspects of a security-minded systems administrator. Topics that will be covered include intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, and recovery, along with relevant tools to accomplish each mission.

    Josh Fenio is a software engineer in Northern Nevada, known as “stderr” or “dataw0lf” on the IRCs.

     

  • mindjuju 11:09 on Thursday, 21 May 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Security + PHP 

    I’m pleased to announce the May Meeting for this Thursday, Security + PHP.

    It’ll cover some of the basics of web application security, such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF), SQL injection and some tips for their prevention and becoming more security conscious. There will be some demonstrations of all the topics with some suggested solutions. We’ll also see a demonstration of the simplistic Browser exploitation Framework (BeEF) project from bindshell.net , which presents an interesting take on potentials of XSS and XSRF within the browser.

    A little about Eric:

    I’ve been a programmer since I was age 12, back in the days of TI-83 graphing calculators and the lot. From there, I learned to develop through a combination of languages including Visual Basic, Delphi, and C/C++ with mostly security and personal firewall penetration testing applications that performed on the Windows platform. I learned substantially about the Windows API framework and developed most of my system level programming skillsets from this focus. I’m coming up on my senior year of my Bachelor’s degree program at Weber State University and work almost exclusively with web development technologies, such as PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, etc.

    For the past year, I’ve worked at Code Greene, a web development company based in downtown Salt Lake City; I’ve worked on backend medium to large scale integration projects as well as custom PHP and CakePHP web frontends and sites, though my preferences are towards integration and API projects. While I know CakePHP best, I have looked at other PHP frameworks, such as Code Igniter and Zend Framework. In terms of my computer preferences, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming so a Linux distro, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu, with some quality hardware usually suits me well. I don’t like Windows much anymore, as in the past year I have migrated all but one of my home systems to Ubuntu and only have to use Windows minimally at the university. Honestly, either way works if I can get the job done without too many runarounds, and you know…button clicks.

    Eric can be followed on twitter at xtrementl (Extreme-NTL).

    This text will be replaced

     

  • mindjuju 22:51 on Monday, 13 April 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    SSL + Apache 

    This Thursday’s meeting is going to be presented on SSL + Apache. It will cover SSL basics, how SSL works, how to get an SSL certificate, how to create your own certificates. The difference between self signed and certificate authorities. Building your own certificate authority. How to configure Apache with an SSL certificate. And other general SSL tips and tricks.

    Lonnie Olson aka. fungus is a long time Linux/BSD administrator with a love of programming, networking, and security. Infrequent postings can be found at http://lonnieolson.com/ or on twitter @fungus.

    This text will be replaced

     

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