Atlanta PHP

When: Thursday, February 1, 2007—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: When Your Pet Project Grows Up, Part 1

Robert Swarthout and Zack Huston will present on their experiences scaling their site PaperBackSwap.com:

So what happens when your pet project is no longer a small little site but rather a site with thousands of visitors a day? This month we will talk about the growing pains and code changes we have experienced in taking our pet project to a site that has in excess of 650,000 page loads a day. Can your site scale? What kind of hardware, database and software has it taken to scale our site, PaperBackSwap.com? We will share our experiences with these issues and many other problems we have tackled. Let it be known that we are not experts, just normal Joes sharing what we have learned and continue to discover.

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Registration for PHP Throwdown is now open, and it’d be nice to see a team from Atlanta PHP compete. If you’re wondering what is PHP Throwdown, here are a few details:

When: January 27, 2007
What: A competition to see what can be accomplished with PHP in 24 hours.
Who: You! You can compete in a team, or individually, so if you think you’ve got what it takes, then sign up!

For more information or to sign up, check out the website at http://phpthrowdown.com/

I’ve started a thread for initial PHP Throwdown discussion on the Atlanta PHP forum at http://forum.atlphp.org/index.php/t/173/

I can’t participate since I’m a judge, but it’d be nice to see a group from Atlanta PHP sign up and compete. If you’d like to discuss things as a team, log on to the #atlphp channel on Freenode IRC. I’ll be hanging around there in case anyone has any questions about the competition.

Atlanta PHP announces its official Call for Proposals!

Atlanta PHP meets on the first Thursday of every month at 7:00pm Eastern Time in midtown Atlanta. We seek a wide variety of presentation topics of interest to intermediate-to-advanced Web developers with a focus on PHP and related technologies. Atlanta PHP connects and unites PHP users across the Southeast, provides world-class support and resources to the community, and advocates the adoption of PHP to local, national, and international businesses.

If you will be in the Atlanta area on the first Thursday of a month and would like to present a PHP-related topic at an Atlanta PHP meeting, please contact Ben Ramsey (ben [at] atlphp.org) and include your talk title, brief synopsis of your talk, full contact information (including phone number), and desired meeting date.

At this time, we cannot provide a speaker compensation package, though this is being investigated for the future. If you are interested in sponsorship opportunities allowing Atlanta PHP to provide speaker compensation packages, please contact Ben Ramsey (ben [at] atlphp.org) for further details.

In addition to our regular monthly meetings with presentations, we also get together on the third Thursday of each month for an informal coffee break. There’s no topic, just a nice little get-together. Anyone is welcome to come out and have a cup of coffee and chat.

We meet at Octane at the corner of Marietta Street and Howell Mill on Thursday, January 18th at 7pm.

Octane Coffee Bar & Lounge
1009 Marietta St NW
Atlanta , GA 30318

When: Thursday, January 4, 2007—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: Debugging

Alan Pinstein will speak on practices and methods for debugging PHP applications.

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.