Rasmus Lerdorf talk at the ´óÏó´«Ã½
Post categories: Event,Ìýrasmus-lerdorf
| 14:32 UK time, Friday, 15 May 2009
Last week, Backstage was really pleased to have over for a presentation to developers at the ´óÏó´«Ã½. If you don't know Rasmus, he's credited with creating and has been at Yahoo! for 7 years, he gave us an introduction to PHP and how it's used at Yahoo!
It was a very interesting talk, whatever your views on PHP. I was especially interested in the questions people asked, so have posted a few below.
Q: What's the deploy process at Yahoo!?
A: We have a central package database to ask what package versions are available. What ever you pick it makes sure it picks out the files automatically so they're not half written in the cache.
Q: In terms of source control how do you organize that?
A: We started with CVS but we're mostly Subversion with Git, we build Wine packages and people work in small groups. We have a central control team called 'the paranoids' and we have a code ferret that looks for things. We look for patterns and then red flag things. My goal recently has been to push things developed towards an open source form.
Q: Staging servers?
A: People make their own processes - Yahoo! is a company of 35 companies so you will get different processes in different areas. Some of the code will be horrible and you'll have the desire to pull it apart - it's tricky as you don't want to rock the boat - i.e. it's weird, but it works for them. There are no central services.
Do we use different languages for different parts of Yahoo!?
PHP is the default and so is C++ Fireagle was built in Ruby on Rails, but it's now in Ruby - Delicious was in Perl for years but is now in PHP. Seven years ago we decided to write everything in PHP, we needed to do this as we had 4 different code bases in Singapore and we had all sorts of coders writing different code. We had to make some hard decisions - even where other code would have been better than PHP - we had to do it to standardize everything.
Q: Any drawbacks to using PHP?
A: We may have to revisit it, but not in the next 3-5 years - maybe if I leave!
Q: Will PHP be used more for unit testing in the future?
A: Yes, there's simple test written by a guy in London, but problems are a separate thing. I keep things very simple - there are some very strong opinions but I don't want to get into any battles - PHP is a part of a larger system but you get to decide what you test.
Q: Do you have any recommendations on serving personalized content whilst making the service more dynamic?
A: We don't serve a single static page at Yahoo! - from ads to personalized data we use good code, it has good latency - we work backwards - you build it so you hit the numbers, it's not impossible if you throw effort at it. It's all customizable with news, comics, content, mail etc - not doing it to save money doesn't make
Last week, Backstage was really pleased to have Rasmus Lerdorf over for a presentation to developers at the ´óÏó´«Ã½. If you don't know Rasmus, he's credited with creating PHP and has been at Yahoo for 7 years, he gave us an introduction to PHP and how it's used at Yahoo.
It was a very interesting talk, whatever your views on PHP. I was especially interested in the questions people asked, so have posted a few below.
sense.
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