Facebook has announced “Hip Hop”, a PHP to C++ compiler stack that they hope will overcome some of the scaling and speed issues associated with PHP apps. The video above lays out the reasons they started the project and the types of things they want to accomplish with it. As a PHP developer, this project is of great interest to me. Most encouraging is the fact that someone other than Zend, the primary developers of PHP, is putting significant resources toward the popular language for Web apps. The project is set to be released to the open source community in the near future.
Tag Archive for 'software development'
Here is a well-written piece by Paul Graham on why software developers (or generically, anyone who is a maker of something) hate meetings. As someone who lives between the worlds of those who make and those who manage, I deal with the struggle from both sides, but my mind is a maker’s mind. While this piece is written from the maker’s perspective, it gives other makers a fairly accurate view of how managers perceive time management and the scheduling of a day. Graham lays out the unique challenge of making things work despite the differences in time-management needs.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
(h/t Bart Lewis)
