November 2014 Summaries

The PHP programming language remains the most popular server-side language powering the web and used by 82% of websites, with its usage increasing by 1% in the past year. This growth can be attributed to tools like Composer, which has doubled the number of tracked packages and reached 45 million installations. The top contributors to Packagist, a package repository for PHP projects, include Fabien Potencier, who leads the ranking with 22 packages referenced by 16412 other packages, followed by Sebastian Bergman, Taylor Otwell, Benjamin Eberlei, Jordi Boggiano, Pádraic Brady, and Kitamura Satoshi. These individuals have created essential libraries that are widely used in PHP projects, demonstrating their impact on the open-source community.

The engineering team at DigitalOcean replaced their current DNS resolvers with a new, lightning-fast solution to improve scalability and reliability. The goal was to minimize downtime while handling the high volume of queries per second. To achieve this, they designed an application flow that allows for fallback to the old system in case of failure. The team developed a conversion library to handle BIND syntax, stress-tested the new system, and concurrently wrote data to the new service before switching it over. After a successful rollout, all DNS is now served off the new architecture, resulting in nearly instant propagation times and improved performance.

The text highlights the achievements of various hackathons and developers during Hacktoberfest, a month-long event that promotes open source development and supports developer communities. The events covered include HackMIT, which brought together over 900 students to create 284 projects; HackRU, where high school students were encouraged to participate in coding challenges; HackNY, which features a reunion for alumni of the HackNY fellows program and has a track record of creative hacks winning the contest; HackNC, which saw a trend of more students incorporating hardware elements into their hacks; and HackPR, which was the largest event with approximately 280 participants. The projects showcased include innovative apps, games, and hardware-based solutions that demonstrate the creativity and talent of developers worldwide.

DigitalOcean has partnered with TrueAbility to host a Docker Puzzle Challenge, where participants will attempt to solve a jigsaw puzzle using their Docker administration skills and compete for bragging rights on the leaderboard. The contest runs from November 1st to 30th, and the top 10 performers will be guaranteed an interview with DigitalOcean. To attract Linux and containerization experts, DigitalOcean is looking for candidates who possess qualities such as being a self-learner, excellent problem solvers, and keeping up with current tech trends. The company values innovative hiring techniques like TrueAbility to quickly filter out the best candidates and speed up the process of finding talented individuals. Tammy Butow, DigitalOcean's customer support manager, has been using TrueAbility to find top talent for her team, and the company is excited to create a new challenge that simulates real-life experiences, such as Docker-based testing, to assess skills in a more engaging way. The goal is to find developers who can work with leading open-source technologies like Docker on DigitalOcean Droplets.