Yahoo, the great and the good

Today I had some PHP training from Rasmus Lerdorf while he is in London. Rasmus invented the PHP language, and now he works for Yahoo!.

The training was very interesting, although a little theoretical in places. He talked a lot about performance, and demoed the new features in PHP 5.2. This is one of the reasons I really love working for Yahoo!, some of the best and the brightest work for us. But it’s not just that, he is a really zealot for performance. I love that.

There is that great episode of The Simpsons with the Chuck Garabedian Mega-Savings Seminar. You’ve got to squeeze every penny! That is how I think of Rasmus and performance. It was really interesting to see how he optimised a near hundred-fold performance increase in a simple application. While I don’t expect to see that in production, I can imagine it would be possible to see a 5 or even 10 fold speed increase.

I’m looking forward to learning about security tomorrow.

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Web Development, php, rasmuslerdorf, yahoo