Here is a summary of the talk:

There comes a point in time with a website when eventually need to do something in the background. There are always cron jobs, but eventually those either don’t scale well, or are not responsive enough. Learn about how to help your website efficiently scale by using workers. We’ll discuss the fundamental theory behind workers and how to easily implement them. We’ll learn about several different technologies to help manage workers such as Gearman, Supervisord, Redis, and others.

I will be giving the presentation, so I guess I better put a bio here. :P Justin Carmony works for Deseret Digital Media as a Director of Development over DeseretNews.com. He has been working in PHP professionally for over 8 years, and has been attending the UPHPU meetings since 2008.

Current Venue: Needle.com

The current venue for the rest of this year at Needle.com. The great thing is it is in the same building complex as last year’s venue, C7. Here is the new address (and map if you like):

Needle Inc.
14864 Pony Express Road
Bluffdale, UT 84065

H will be presenting on “Scaling From 2 to 6″:

At some point in any successful web(site|app)’s lifetime, you have to tackle scaling. The first hurdle is having a separate box for your database—going from 1 box to 2 (This is where a lot of sites start these days). The next hurdle is significantly higher. It involves having load balanced web/app servers, a master and a slave database and a caching server. The focus will be on a traditional LAMP stack, but the principles are fairly universal.

Since H didn’t give me his Bio, I’ll give it for him! H is the Director of Development for Deseret Digital Media on the Marketplace team. He oversees many of KSL.com’s sites such as KSL Deals, KSL Jobs, KSL Local, Utah.com, and several others. Yes, his whole first name is spelt with a single character, “H”, and he is normally sleep deprived with his two twin babies at home. He is also a pretty good guy. :)

New Venue: Needle.com

We’d like to thank Vivint for hosting us while we were in-between venues and new presidents, however we did receive a lot of people asking if we could move it back to the other side of the point of the mountain. We have found the new venue for the rest of the year at Needle.com. The great thing is it is in the same building complex as last year’s venue, C7. Here is the new address (and map if you like):

Needle Inc.
14864 Pony Express Road
Bluffdale, UT 84065

KSS is a set of guidelines to help you produce an HTML styleguide tied to CSS documentation that is nice to read in plain text, yet structured enough to be automatically extracted and processed by a machine. It is designed with CSS preprocessors (such as SCSS or LESS) in mind, and flexible enough to accommodate a multitude of CSS frameworks (such as YUI, Blueprint or 960).

KSS-PHP is a php library that you can use to turn your KSS documented files into a living styleguide similar to Github’s (https://github.com/styleguide/css). Styleguides are helpful for maintaining consistency across your sites, getting new developers up to speed, proving out new designs or additions, and ensuring changes or updates to your css don’t break existing styles.

Russell is the Director of Web Development for Scan, a Provo based startup that connects the real world with the digital universe in fun and innovative ways. Previous to that, Russell worked as the Director of eCommerce Development at Deseret Digital Media, Senior Developer at Bloosky, Team Lead at BYU’s Department of Continuing Education, and as a Web Development instructor at BYU.

Our meeting will be held at 7:00PM at the Vinit Office’s in Thanksgiving Point, and the after party will be at Applebee’s in Draper as usual. At this meeting we will be discussing venues as well.

Directions To Current Venue: Vivint Offices in Thanksgiving Point

For this meeting we will be meeting at the Thanksgiving Point Vivint Offices, which is just one more exit south than our previous venue. Here is the address:

2500 Executive Pkwy #200, Lehi, Utah 84043

Here is a link in Google Maps:

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2500+West+Executive+Parkway+Suite+300,+Lehi,+UT+84043&aq=&sll=39.499761,-111.547028&sspn=8.839041,10.579834&vpsrc=0&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2500+Executive+Pkwy+%23200,+Lehi,+Utah+84043&t=m&z=17

Here are the directions given by our very own Mac Newbold:

Easiest way: get off I-15 at Timpanogos Highway (SR-92) and head west (right if you’re coming from Draper, left if you came north through Lehi)

the next light in about a block is Ashton Blvd/Maple Loop – turn left and about 3-4 blocks later, after the in-construction building, there’s a road on the left right before the thanksgiving point complex starts,

that’s executive parkway

you’ll turn left there and we’re the building on the left that is finished

come on in, 2nd floor

Look forward to seeing everyone Thursday night at 7:00 PM! Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions!

Presentation on Selenium

Jon will be presenting on Selenium, a tool for automating tests of websites. From Seleium’s website:

Selenium automates browsers. That’s it. What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.

Current Venue: Vivint Offices in Thanksgiving Point

For this meeting we will be meeting at Thanksgiving Point Vivint Offices, which is just one more exit south than our previous venue. Here is the address:

2500 Executive Pkwy #200, Lehi, Utah 84043

Here is a link in Google Maps:

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2500+West+Executive+Parkway+Suite+300,+Lehi,+UT+84043&aq=&sll=39.499761,-111.547028&sspn=8.839041,10.579834&vpsrc=0&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2500+Executive+Pkwy+%23200,+Lehi,+Utah+84043&t=m&z=17

Here are the directions given by our very own Mac Newbold:

Easiest way: get off I-15 at Timpanogos Highway (SR-92) and head west (right if you’re coming from Draper, left if you came north through Lehi)

the next light in about a block is Ashton Blvd/Maple Loop – turn left and about 3-4 blocks later, after the in-construction building, there’s a road on the left right before the thanksgiving point complex starts,

that’s executive parkway

you’ll turn left there and we’re the building on the left that is finished

come on in, 2nd floor

Look forward to seeing everyone Thursday night at 7:00 PM! Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions!

An Intro to Server Configuration and Remote Management with Salt

Are you tired of repeatedly configuring each new server by hand? Is your current configuration management system driving you nuts and making you feel like you’re in a straight jacket? Are you scared because that 5 year old mission critical server could have a hardware failure at any moment, yet nobody still working at your company has any idea what’s on it or how to configure it?

Salt is designed to solve these problems and much much more.  Manage one or two servers in a clean simple manner.  Control 20,000 to 30,000 servers like a Sith Master!  Duplicate your web server in a matter of minutes on the cloud of your choice.   Query available disk space on 100′s of servers in a matter of a few seconds right from your CLI.

Easily create your own Salt modules to add functionality specific to your infrastructure and needs. Salt bends to your will! Use Salt’s python api or rest api to give the power of Salt to your custom application.

And best of all, join Salt’s huge and passionate community of users on the mailing list and #salt on irc.freenode.net.  Salt was the project with the 8th most unique code contributors on Github in 2012! (https://github.com/blog/1359-the-octoverse-in-2012)  Salt has a very welcoming and helpful community and is designed to make it very simple to contribute and participate.

New Venue: Vivint Offices in Thanksgiving Point

We’d like to thank C7 for hosting us for this last year & excited to see their growth! Unfortunately, this means the conference room area we used for meetings is being converted into office spaces to handle their growth.

So the new venue will be at the Thanksgiving Point Vivint Offices, which is just one more exit south than C7. Here is the address:

2500 Executive Pkwy #200, Lehi, Utah 84043

Here is a link in Google Maps:

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2500+West+Executive+Parkway+Suite+300,+Lehi,+UT+84043&aq=&sll=39.499761,-111.547028&sspn=8.839041,10.579834&vpsrc=0&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2500+Executive+Pkwy+%23200,+Lehi,+Utah+84043&t=m&z=17

Here are the directions given by our very own Mac Newbold:

Easiest way: get off I-15 at Timpanogos Highway (SR-92) and head west (right if you’re coming from Draper, left if you came north through Lehi)

the next light in about a block is Ashton Blvd/Maple Loop – turn left and about 3-4 blocks later, after the in-construction building, there’s a road on the left right before the thanksgiving point complex starts,

that’s executive parkway

you’ll turn left there and we’re the building on the left that is finished

come on in, 2nd floor

Look forward to seeing everyone Thursday night at 7:00 PM! Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions!

Thursday, November 15th, 7pm at C7 Bluffdale Data Center. See you there!

If you think [insert your VCS here] is the bee’s knees and can tell us a little bit about it and defend your opinion, we’d love to have your help. At a bare minimum, we’ll have SVN and git represented, but I’d like to get some of the others covered too if we have anyone who uses Mercurial (hz), Bazaar (bzr), BitKeeper, TFS, CVS, RCS, or whatever other system you think we should all know about. It probably goes without saying that it will almost certainly be a lively conversation.

If you’re interested in helping out, please contact Mac Newbold. We will likely end up with multiple panelists on the popular VCS choices, so don’t worry about having to do it alone or not being the first to reply. Within reason, the more the merrier I think.

Same time, same place: 7:00pm at C7 Bluffdale, then Applebee’s after the meeting

Usual meeting details apply:

7:00pm at C7 Bluffdale Datacenter

Afterparty at Draper Applebee’s (12300 South, just east of I-15)

Title: An Intro to Riak and PHP
Presenter: Randy Secrist

This talk will be an introduction to Riak, an open source, scalable database, and how to interact with it from various client libraries, with a focus on PHP. Attendees will learn the basic architecture of Riak, why companies like Voxer, Comcast, and BestBuy trust it in production, and also get some hands-on experience with running the database on their own machines.

The usual details apply: 3rd Thursday (Aug. 16th) 7:00pm at C7 Bluffdale Datacenter, with afterparty at Draper Applebee’s (12300 South, just east of I-15)