Feedster Gains Some Killersoft

As some may know, and some may not — but I’m pleased to formally announce* that I recently joined Feedster.com as a Senior Software Engineer.

In doing so, I inherited a lot of legacy PHP4 code, a mishmash of procedural code, third party OOP bits, and an instance or two of OOP attempts that shouldn’t have been. A bit of a mess, in other words.

Like many start-ups, the original Feedster code (the PHP code, at least) was done quickly, with the focus being on functionality rather than cleanliness. With any start-up, the initial goal is survival, and now that Feedster is into its third year (at least on the calendar), the original code did what it needed to do, and did it well enough that Feedster is still a viable company.

However, every codebase has to grow up or die eventually, and in the case of Feedster, both have happened. The original code has been purged, and I’ve re-written (or am re-writing) all of Feedster’s PHP code from scratch in PHP5.

Now that the new Feedster.com website has rolled out phase one of a multi-phase release, I figure it’s time to dust off the ‘ol blog and write about some of my experiences in writing an enterprise web application that really scales in PHP5.

It ain’t your big brother’s Feedster anymore, and I’ll share what I can of what’s new under the hood.

Note: Feedster didn’t buy Killersoft or anything like that … They just convinced me to hang up the contractor hat for awhile. My side projects like Pearified.com will march onward … probably more steadily now that the paycheck is steadier. 😊

* Why’d it take so long to announce? Well, I’ve been busy — rewrote all of Feedster.com’s front-facing code in PHP5 in two months. Sorry about the delayed announcement.