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Snowball stemming in PHP
When working on my PHP search engine I needed a stemmer to improve the tokenization and search index. After some research, I found the PECL Stem package, which uses the Snowball Stemming algorithm and has support for multiple languages. Exactly what I needed!
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OAuth authentication in PHP
Setting up OAuth doesn’t have to be a pain. There are tons of well-written and documented libraries for OAuth out there that are easy to use. If you want to authenticate against one of the larger sites on the web, like Facebook and Google, chances are that you don’t have to do much more than installing the library and setting up some routs for the auth callback. In this post, I’m going to walk through a slightly more complex scenario, where we are gonna authenticate against Basecamps API.
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Build your own Search Engine 101
For many of us, there is something magical with a search engine. You type in a few well selected words and out comes, hopefully, exactly what we are looking for. So how does it work? In this post I’ll go through some of the basic building blocks needed for a basic search engine.
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1000 Tweets per Week
How do you generate and post thousands of tweets in a week? One of my first projects at Engage was to scrape data and generate tweets for all new records fetched from an external API. Your first thought might be to store the data in a database and just remove or flag the record when it has been processed and the tweet has been posted. This might work depending on your setup, but it is not a good solution. A better solution is to use a work queue system, like Beanstalkd, to solve the problem.
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PHP[World]
My second week at Engage I was invited to join the rest of Engage’s developers at the PHP[World] conference here in DC. The conference was great, with many interesting and inspiring talks. One of my most memorable experiences from the conference was the dinner with the creator of the Laravel framework, Taylor Otwell, and the Capital Laravel Meetup group.
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Hello World!
A little more than a month ago I left almost everything back in Sweden to go to the US for an internship at a digital agency called Engage in Washington, DC. Even though I’ve just been here for a month I have already learned a lot, both new cool tools and frameworks like Laravel, Vagrant, Composer, AWS and Beanstalkd, and also a great deal about life as an agency developer.
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