The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup

Well, tomorrow is the October meetup, so I guess I’m way overdue for posting the slides from last month’s Cufon and Lint presentations.

I wish I had known about this sooner, as it’s almost Christmas (you did finish your shopping, right?).  OmniTI, a New York web development consultancy, is publishing their annual PHP Advent blog.  Today’s article, Yet, echoes a lot of my feelings toward PHP these days.

If there were a product statement for PHP, it’d probably be something like “only a drunken Martian could come up with this.” [. . .] I, myself, have been known to go through episodes of periodical rejection, during which I can’t stand a particular feature of PHP (and, often, of other products, but that’s a different story), but I haven’t given up on PHP—yet.

I also enjoyed Coping with the Holiday Shopping Spree, an article on enhancing client-side site loading performance.

My boss offered to reimburse the developers at work if we wanted to join the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery.  I think that’s what counts as our Christmas bonus, but I’ll take it.  I’ve been meaning to join for a few years now.

While checking out their site, I found a link to save 15% on your first year’s professional membership.  It’s through ACM Queue, one of their publications.  Just visit the link below for instructions.

Save 15% on your first year as an ACM member

With the discount, my membership came to $84 and change.

ACM has a lot of resources and groups available to their members, online and off.  That includes online access to a bunch of technical books, including a bunch published by O’Reilly.  For the cost of two technical books, I have access to over 1,000.  That alone makes the membership worth it.