Code Freeze Fun

The holiday season is HauteLook’s busiest time of year. We have spent a lot of time creating new products and optimizing website performance for the increase in traffic. We can now sit back and monitor our dashboards. This makes it a perfect time for us to implement a code freeze and spend some time on internal projects. These projects include paying off technical debt, planning for the 2012 year and training. Here are some of my activities during code freeze:

Attended the jQuery Summit

I spend most of my time working with server-side technologies, such as PHP and MySQL. The jQuery Summit had a great developer track that exposed many of the new trends and technologies being used to power websites. I discovered things like Backbone.js, RequireJS (AMD), better ways to handle iframes and now have a more in-depth understanding how jQuery works.

Streamlining the build process

We like pushing lots of small changes throughout the workday instead of large changes. I have been working with the release manager on some bottlenecks in the release process. I have been adding new features to our open source IRC bot plugin to make it easier for our developers to keep track of what is being released. HauteLook uses the Phergie IRC bot and our Jira plugin exposes a lot of common Jira tasks as IRC commands.

Learning Backbone.js

I am working with the front-end team to integrate Backbone.js into our existing codebase. We are always trying to improve processes, especially the amount of time it takes to create and improve features. The HauteLook backend is fairly well architected and organized. There is a clear separation of MVC concerns and our Restful API makes it easy to expose HauteLook to other platforms. Backbone.js looks to provide this same sort of separation to the front-end. A number of us are implementing existing website features using Backbone.js and discussing what we learned and what best practices to introduce to the entire team.

Fixing bugs and adding features to xhprof

Performance is a big deal at HauteLook. Our bursty traffic patterns present a hard, but interesting challenge to keep the API, website and all platforms fast. I created a custom fork of Facebook’s xhprof to store PHP performance profiling data on Amazon S3 and created a more functional dashboard to view the results. Recently, I stumbled across a tweet from Paul Reinheimer about the xhprof fork he had been working on. I decided to collaborate with him and merge my changes into his fork.

Attending the PHP Architect Cloud Summit

PHP Architect hosted a cloud summit where a number of startups presented on how they were using the cloud. HauteLook is traditional in that we have a data center with hardware that we own. We do use some cloud features, such as Amazon S3, where appropriate. A number of us attended the online summit and discussed the ways we can leverage new cloud technology.

Planning for the release PHP 5.4

The release of PHP 5.4 will bring about some significant fundamental changes to the way PHP works. I am already assessing what PHP changes we have to make in order to upgrade to 5.4. This involves custom builds of PHP to run the .phpt tests that ship with PHP on our production web servers and running our PHPUnit test suite against 5.4.