Happy 25th birthday, PHP!

PHP 25th birthday

PHP, the language that has truly changed the web, is celebrating its 25th birthday. Over time, it gained an army of fans and army of haters, and it’s still difficult to tell which one is larger.

As someone who is using the language since its early days (yes, PHP 3), I’m glad to see that it is still around, it is still going strong, and it is still vital for the larger portions of the web.

Huge thanks go to the core development team, community, and millions of contributors and users.  It wouldn’t have been the same without you.  Happy birthday, PHP!

And here’s an awesome timeline to help you remember all the years!

 

2019 – what a year!

Today is the last day of 2019, and what a year it has been! It feels like it packed enough for a decade.

In January, there was an internal company announcement of me resigning from CTO position in Qobo Ltd, a job I had for 4.5 years (which is my second longest run in one place). In February, this became public and I wrote this blog post.

Most of February and March, I’ve spent recharging my batteries, exploring my options, going to interviews and solving technical tests. While there is a huge market in Cyprus for an experienced IT professional, I didn’t feel like getting yet another job. I needed something new.

So from March or April I’ve started putting a few things together. Running a business is not my native habitat, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. I’ve started putting a few ideas, people, and first clients together, and, slowly at first, the wheels started turning.

AlleoTech Ltd was incorporated in July, and by then everything was in motion. A startup is like a newborn child, it takes all the time and effort, and then some more. But I’m proud to say that next Wednesday we’ll celebrate a 6 month birthday.

It’s been a wild ride so far, but everything seems to be working out just fine. Even better than expected in all of ways.

With all that going on, I’ve learned a tonne of new technology and how people use it. I’ve also met more people this year than probably in the last ten years. I’ve also got schooled in a number of non-technical areas, such as accounting, legal, marketing and PR, sales, and finance.

I’d like to thank each and everyone of you, without who none of this would be possible. You are all great!

Next year looks to be very promising and exciting. There are quite a few things in the making and it looks like I’ll be quite busy for a long time to come.

Once again, thanks, and have a very Happy New Year!

AlleoTech Ltd comes alive!

Since I left my previous CTO position at Qobo Ltd back in February, a lot of you were asking me what’s next and what am I up to. And I was mostly dodging the question. Not because the answer was a great secret, but because I didn’t want to jinx it – there were still too many variables, unknowns, and moving parts.

The time has come where I can talk openly about it. I have been working with a few people to setup a new company. While the process is far from complete, the first milestone has been achieved this week. AlleoTech Ltd is now incorporated as a Limited Liability Company in Cyprus.

We are still working on the corporate structure, roles, and on bringing in the team, but from now on we are open for business.

Let me shed some light on what that business is. The primary and strategic goal of the company is to build a product. This part, I’m still not at liberty to discuss in much detail. But what I can say is this: the product is blockchain based and is aimed at businesses who work with blockchain. For the rest, you’ll have to wait, or, if you are rich and impatient – invest.

In the meantime though, while we are sorting out the funding, we sell our time and expertise in other technologies that we know. These are mainly cloud infrastructure on Amazon AWS and web development. So if you have any needs in that area, hire us.

Needless to say that the last few months were quite busy. We had to figure out and work with a million things from a variety of disciplines – corporate law, accounting, marketing, and so on and so forth.

We did manage to bring up a rather basic website for now, which is still work in progress. You can follow our blog for company updates and some technical posts from the areas that we deal with. Today we have even setup some of the social media accounts at LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

So, now that you know, wish me luck and send some business our way. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for all of your support!

Welcome to HTTPS

Finally, after years and years of recommending Let’s Encrypt to everyone, this blog has now followed its own advice and moved to HTTPS. All the old links should be automatically redirected as well, so most people probably won’t notice any difference. But if you do, please do let me know.

BitBucket: 10 million users

BitBucket is celebrating an important milestone – 10 million registered users. With 28 million repositories and 3.5 million build minutes every week, BitBucket is a vital tool for many teams.

I am (and have been) a member of several teams and projects, which heavily rely on BitBucket (and BitBucket pipelines) for their day-to-day operation.

Happy 10 million milestone, BitBucket! Keep it the great work!