Today’s Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) on both Facebook and Twitter and possibly several more services show how dependent we are on today’s technology. Moreover, they proved that it is rather easy to attack very popular services. It’s no surprise that both services are not too happy about what happened and they seem to have decided to investigate the cause together, and  more importantly, how to prevent it. Some sources claim that Google has been attacked as well. And that is something that we experienced in the afternoon. Mail was hardly responding or not available at all. So, what is a DDoS attack?

Finally it happened: PHP 5.3 was released. It was a long awaited release, as it brings many improvements and features together with over 140 bug fixes. It’s almost like PHP 6 but without full Unicode support. In this post I will present the things I was either particularly waiting for or was just interested in.

During this year’s php|tek conference in Chicago a spontaneous meeting about PHP standards took place. It was organized by a group of people usually working on a couple of important PHP projects like Zend Framework, PEAR, Solar, Agavi, CakePHP, symfony and phing. Unfortunately,  I wasn’t there but the note about the initiative I have found on Left On The Web blog made me really happy.

Design patterns are technology independent but the way of implementation can vary based on the programming language that is used. The book “php|architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns” by Jason Sweat presents some of the design patterns which might be helpful while implementing web applications in PHP 4 and 5. Additionally, it is a good reference to Test Driven Development methodology.

4developers conference aims to become the biggest conference for developers in Poland. That’s why four independent paths where available to choose from: Java, IT Project Management, .NET & C# and last but not least – Dedicated Languages. As I’m a PHP Development Manager at GOYELLO, and I was mainly interested in IT Project Management and Dedicated Languages. The first name is self-explanatory and the later covered topics related to PHP, Ruby, Python and other (f.e. Scala).