How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

This Hacker News thread is full of tips, tricks, and references to reducing Amazon AWS costs.  There is plenty of good advice from cleaning up the data and releasing unused resources, to monitoring the reserved instances usage, to moving data from elastic volumes to the Amazon S3 for cheaper storage and smaller traffic bills.

MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check

Percona Database Performance Blog runs this post – MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check – comparing the MySQL, MariaDB and the Percona Server for MySQL.  I think that most people using MySQL or MariaDB today consider them to be pretty much identical (a fork for legal reasons or something along those lines).   This blog post shows that there are quite a few significant differences.

Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins” is yet another take on customizing the Vim text editor and making it into a full featured IDE.  Most of these things were possible for years (I even had my own blog post on the subject), but with every version of Vim it gets easier and easier to setup a more advanced developer environment.

object-graph – visualizing PHP objects

As you might know, I am a big fan of GraphViz.  I’ve used numerous times for visualizing different parts of the project code and dependencies (see here and here for example).

Today I came across a way to visualize PHP objects (not just classes) – object-graph library by Sebastian Bergmann, and I think it’s pretty cool.  If you are working on top of a PHP framework like CakePHP and Laravel, I suspect your object diagrams will get quite huge, but for more modular applications and libraries it should do the job just fine.

Clockwork – PHP developer tools integration for Google Chrome

Clockwork is a PHP library and a Google Chrome extension that work together to provide a new tab in the Google Chrome DevTools for PHP developers.  The tab contains all sorts of useful information such as variable values, application tracing, timing, and more.