A while ago I have hinted at some big news for me. Well its finally time I announce them: I have reduced my workload at Liip to 80%. Since all I really spend money on is Frisbee tournaments (which are not that expensive), I have decided I can afford myself this luxury. However playing even more Frisbee is not something my body can take and without a new hobby I would surely just end up sitting in front of the computer coding. So I have thought about the things I have enjoyed in recent times but did not get the time to follow up on and then I realized that I always had a lot of fun filling in as a DJ (even if just using my cellphone) at Frisbee parties when the DJ went home too early or bored the crowd with non danceable stuff.

I was just reading through the various blog posts on this topic on the tram (yeah catching up from a long frisbee weekend). So this blog post is essentially an idea I actually wanted to implement in a recent project, which unfortunately the client did not prioritize high enough to make it out of the product backlog (scrum lingo). Anyways it seems to offer a solution to the problem at hand as well.

I certainly feel a bit like a fool. Anyways some of you might have read Toby's April fools joke. While we are not implementing GOSUB, PHP 5.3RC2 is put on hold for now. It seems like all core developers are currently busy with other things than finishing up PHP 5.3 or they are working behind the scenes on hopefully nothing all to grand or problematic in PHP 5.3. At least communication is at essentially zero atm. Since I am a tooth-less "manager" .. actually more like a cheerleader and moderator .. I guess I will lean back, wait and see until people are ready to play ball again.

So it seems there are a few choices to get rid of PHP 5.1.6 that comes with RHEL5. Why get rid of it? Because I want to use a version of PHP that was released in the last few months or even year and not something that is a few years old and relies on the vendor to backport security fixes into a branch that is officially dead by the parent project. The obvious choice would be the RH AppStack. At a reasonable price it would be an easy sell to my customers. However the price is far from reasonable if you do not care to also get a license and support for JBoss in the bundle. So I guess if I want to still sound all enterprisey it seems I have two choices: Oracle RPM's or Zend Server. I have not really looked at pricing of the support options there. Obviously its tricky to introduce yet another support provider into the mix, since sysadmins love that "one throat to choke", but if the pricing is competitive enough it could work. I guess I will need to sit down and give the two a whirl one of these days. If anyone is in the same situation or better yet managed to get out .. please let me know in a comment.

I did not sign a pledge (did not hear about this until today) to blog about a woman in IT I admire on Ada Lovelace Day, nor am I going to mention any women in particular in this blog post. I hope that I have always made it clear in my communication that I respect people based on their actions and nothing else. I do want to pick up on what I have noticed and tried to put an end to at conferences when I encountered it. I never blogged about this and probably I should have, but now that I am seeing that many fellow developers also feel its a hinderance (actually the biggest one) to create an environment where gender is not a factor in judging contributions.