In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a very influential book called The Black Swan - the title referencing to the idea that no matter how many white swans you see, you can never infer from them the existence of a (much rarer) black swan. The book was concerned with extreme events, particularly in the realm of investing, and how their likelihoods are so commonly underestimated. Taleb argues, among othe... read more »

In order to manage the success and popularity of a web site, it needs to be designed to cope with a growing number of users. A site designed to support 50 concurrent users can't serve thousands of simultaneous visitors without collapsing. Thus, the very success of a web site could also be the cause of its failure, if it is not able to sustain the sudden and exponential growth in number of users or requests.

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2 weeks ago, Ibuildings organised the fourth Dutch PHP Conference in the RAI centre in Amsterdam. DPC is a way for us to help PHP developers learn new skills and improve existing ones, but it is also an excellent way to get experts from around the world together and learn about current trends in the PHP ecosystem.


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PHP and Java are both languages with reputations for getting things done, and there are plenty of reasons for combining the two, particularly in an Enterprise environment. The most common situation is for an organisation with an existing Java infrastructure to want to develop PHP projects, for all the reasons any enterprise would choose PHP, such as speed of development, cost, desire to use specific open source applications, or availability of staff. Often this is inspired by an internal... read more »