Last night we had a special surprise, as well. Justin Carmony was in contact with Chris Hartjes, author of “The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications”, who donated a free copy of the book to a lucky UPHPU member. I’m pleased to announce that shuffle() selected Clint Berry! You can learn more about Chris and the book at http://www.grumpy-testing.com/ or http://www.littlehart.net/atthekeyboard or follow Chris on Twitter at @grmpyprogrammer. Thanks again, Chris!

Title: Intro to Lithium: The Most Rad PHP Framework

Topic: Discuss latest features introduced in PHP 5.3+ and how they are being leveraged within the Lithium Framework

Speakers:
John Anderson, Software Engineer @ Adobe – the Largest PHP Shop in Utah. John was the Documentation Lead for CakePHP before becoming a founding member of the Union of RAD – the team behind the Lithium Framework. He will provide deep insight into the inner workings of Lithium.
Dan (Danny) Fellars – Entrepreneur working Utah’s next great software company, built on the Lithium Framework. He will share real-life examples of working with Lithium.

The meeting is at the usual time and place (7pm, 3rd Thursday, C7′s Bluffdale data center, please bring picture ID), and we’ll have the usual afterparty (~9pm at Draper Applebees, 123rd South). See you there!

Thursday, January 19th, at 7pm at C7 Bluffdale Datacenter

Joanna Carmony: Best Accounting Practices for the Web Development Industry

Come and learn from an accountant with years of experience what you should be doing better with your books. There should be something for everyone, whether you own a web development business, own a business that does some web development, are self-employed, or just do some freelance on the side.

As time allows, we’ll have a round-table discussion to take advantage of the collective expertise in the group on the subject, and discuss any questions you may have about the business side of web development.

As usual, we’ll be having our after-party at the Draper Applebees, starting around 9pm. Feel free to join us!

What is great about Redis is just how fast it is. In order to achieve its outstanding performance, Redis works with an in-memory dataset. Depending on your use case, you can persist it either by dumping the dataset to disk every once in a while, or by appending each command to a log.

So come down and learn the basics of Redis, whether using it as an advanced cache alternative to Memcached, a queueing system, a data store, or anything where you would benefit from high performance reads and writes.

As the hype around the “cloud” continues to grow, the importance of understanding how it works becomes more and more relevant. This presentation will provide an overview of how an application should be designed to ensure that it can scale well. The presentation will start with an explanation of how some cloud services work followed by things to consider when designing your application to up scale. We’ll finish the presentation (time pending) with a demonstration of a cloud driven work flow and end with a Q/A period.

The presentation will be given with the assumption that the people listening are familiar with PHP development, along with version control systems.