Yesterday, Facebook released HipHop for PHP, a compiler which makes native code from PHP sources (via C++ and gcc). They promise twice the speed with that approach, something which helps you a lot if you have 1000s of servers like Facebook. I won't bore you with the technical details and what it can and can not do as Ilia already summed that up pretty nicely.

We at Liip will certainly look into this technology once it's available and evaluate if it would makes sense for some of our customers and project. As HipHop is not a drop-in replacement for your existing setup this is something which has to be planned and tested carefully. You have to change the way your servers are setup and the way you develop and deploy. It even needs a server restart, if you change some code, so badmouths can now claim that PHP is even more becoming like Java :)

A high amount of Switzerland's most visited sites run on PHP (and some of them are even done by or with us) and maybe HipHop could be useful for some of them, after all the usual optimizations (like APC, memcached, etc) didn't help enough. But for most websites (and more so for small ones), PHP's speed isn't really the bottleneck, it's the database or some other external dependency. And for these cases HipHop isn't the holy grail. So before you change all your setup to fit into HipHop's requirements, do some decent evaluations, what really is the bottleneck in your application and decide accordingly.

Pierre here. After getting my Scrum Master Certification with Danube I was eager to move the scrum artifacts from the digital to the actual physical space. I had this fantastic plan to build a wooden mobile scrum board. One that would look nice and we could take into our different scrum meetings.

On my first attempt to realize this plan, the shop was closed. Bummer! I had forgotten that most shops were closed on Monday mornings. On my next attempt, the shop didn't carry the type of light yet nice looking wood I had envisioned for our board. After finally finding a shop with the right type of wood, it didn't offer the right size. That is when I remembered Jimi Fosdick's words. He was our scrum trainer and told us that we needed nothing but some painter's masking tape and Post-It notes in order to get started. He said: "It doesn't matter how it looks! What's important is that you actually do it! And there is no excuse for not doing it!"

I bought the tape in a do-it shop around the corner. Back in the office, a nice and clean white wall in the our Liip lounge seemed like the perfect spot for our scrum board. Within five minutes the whole thing was set up.

1. The team met on the sofa.
2. We planned a sprint.
3. We started working.
4. It was that easy!

When we were fourth day, our sprint burn down chart actually went down for the first time. On the same day, we had our office-wide team meeting in the lounge and unfortunately the projector was making usage of the exact same wall we chose for our board and charts.

So we tore the whole board down and started looking for a better spot to let the scrum artifacts live. That's when someone noticed a tiny blackboard. It was located just besides a door and didn't offer any space to sit around it. I guess this is why to that day, no one had ever used it. But it was perfect for our daily standup meetings. Using different colors of chalk, we drew our Scrum Board on the blackboard and set up the sprint burn down chart using the tape.

This is how a roll of tape and some Post-It notes changed our everyday lives at work. We have been using this board over the last three months. To this day, no one has expressed any regrets about going physical with the scrum artifacts. On the contrary, we feel even more in control of our sprints. And sure, for when things are distributed and need to be online we still do use the amazing Greenhopper.

So what are your experiences with physical vs. virtual scrum boards?

Last week featured a couple of interesting events in Suisse Romande.

First of all, we attended a very cool Lift Presentations @ Lift Office event in Geneva. Following the Lift@Home concept, sidelines of the Lift10  conference, this evening's theme focused on Innovation and featured four speakers; Christian Miccio from Google and Samuel Mueller from WDHB Consulting explained their point of view on innovation, or how can innovation be created in an organization. Their speech was followed by the very interesting presentation of Giorgio Pauletto and Patrick Genoud from Etat de Genève, sharing how can innovation be implemented and driven in a public organization.

This event was also the occasion to test a very "innovative" system to create interaction between the audience and the speakers: the participants where given different ways to ask their questions or share their thoughts as the presentations went along: twitter, skype, sms, email, paper, etc. All the feedbacks were collected and summarized on the fly by a team of courageous "Lift-ers". It was interesting to see that this way of doing seemed to create much more - indirect of course - interaction than the standard "please ask your questions" at the end of a presentation.

The second event we Liipers took part to last week was a "mash up" of three active web-related communities in Suisse Romande: Swiss Web 2  - a community of Web 2.0 professionals, Tweetzerland  - a group of Romands Twitterers and the Bloggers of Blog o Bar. The event was hosted by Sandrine Szabo in Lausanne (thank you Sandrine). It was really nice to meet cool web addicts from all over Suisse Romande to share a glass of wine, news from the online world and thoughts on new apps / tweaks for our smartphones (thanks to Nico & Phil from Tweetzerland for the pictures).

Next week two webevents with interesting speeches and presenters will take place at our Liip office in Zurich:

First Web Monday Zurich on January 18, 2010:
Dorian Selz will present Memonic, Nektoon's first product, which helps you capture, organize and use content on the web.
Maude Chatelet will present Howtopedia, a collaborative platform for practical knowledge and simple technologies that are easily explainable and usable by individuals or small communities for a sustainable and ecological future. 

Drinks and snacks start at 6.30 pm, the presentations start a bit after 7 pm and like every time lots of time to discuss and network.

The day after the 31st User Group Meeting on January 19, 2010 from 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm:

Schweizr.ch is a Flash based oral history plattform of Switzerland. Anyone can register to write or record stories and post them to a geo location in Switzerland so they appear on the map and create a vivid mosaique representing the diversity of the stories Switzerland has to share.
Schweizr is the first project Liip decided to fully implement in Flex. It uses Google Maps, tons of custom components, Flex specific features and even an iPhone App. In his talk Michel will discuss these features among the many lessons learned in the process of creating this project.

Sourcemate is a new third party plugin designed for Flash Builder 4 that's supposed to simplify and support anything a developer has to deal with in the battle of creating applications - well, except for getting coffee maybe.
In his talk, Weyert will take a close look at the potential the current beta of sourcemate has to offer and will show us, whether Element River rightly refer to their baby as "the new must-have companion tool for serious Flash Builder developers".

Liip's Zürich offices recently got featured in TEC21, a renowned Swiss architecture journal, under the title of "Atmosphäre des Digitalen". Apart from discussing some special features of our operating base, the article critically ponders the notion of "intellectual sensualism" as well as aspects of the relations between architecture and the kind of stuff we do - we use architectural design patterns, they give us software-generated tapestry (picture above). If you're interested: here's the PDF of the entire article - enjoy.

Credits: OOS (architecture), Dominique Wehrli (photography).

For a larger project here at Liip Zurich, we are looking for an experienced Magento PHP Developer. Start as soon as possible. Freelance is ok, but you have to be able to work with the team here in Zurich onsite (most of the time). This also means: No interest in outsourcing, off- and nearshoring or however you call it. We just need a person fully integrated into our already existing Magento team. If you're interested get in contact with Nadja Perroulaz (contact@liip.ch) or me.

Furthermore we're (always) looking for an experienced PHP/Javascript Web Developer. If you're interested in a job where you can learn and develop new stuff almost every day and work on exiting projects and if you have a lot of experiences in the PHP/JavaScript/Web World, do not hesitate to send us your application. The ad linked above is in German, if you don't understand it and want to know more, I'm here to help. Knowing German is no prerequisite for a Job at Liip :)

One of the next Internet Briefings will take place at our Liip Office in Zurich. Join us on Thursday, December 3th 2009 to learn from Mick: How to Build Web Businesses - Lessons learned from Kazaa

Learn from pioneers and big international projects. Mick Liubinskas, ex-Head of Marketing at Kazaa will talk about the lessons learned from the P2P network Kazaa. Kazaa had over 300 million downloads and 5 million users. With more than 50 web businesses Mick helped them understand where they are now and what is the most important thing to focus on. He developed a methodology for building web businesses and helping startups grow.

Detail information an registration can be found at the Internet Briefing website.

The actual edition from Netzwoche does include an article written by our Matthias Stürmer: "Das Konzept der digitalen Nachhaltigkeit - ein Konzept mit Zukunft".

We want to mark an event for the highlights of this eventful past year. And we definitely want to have a drink with all the people who contributed to our success: our clients, partners, friends and the entire Liip team. And of course, as promised, with everybody that helped winning  this year's Master of Swiss Web award. So we're inviting all of you to our Award Night, in order to say thank you, to celebrate and perhaps even dance a bit!

• Venue: EXIL, Hardstrasse 245, 8005 Zürich
• Date: Tuesday, December 1st 2009, door opens at 19:00
• RSVP until November 22nd 2009 at awardnight.liip.ch

We are looking forward to having a great celebration with you!
Do sign up now!

Yours truly,
all the Liipers

Good news for all Adobe Flash oriented folks in the western regions of Switzerland: the Swiss Flash User Group has made effort to set up an event in the captial of Switzerland to bring the discussion and knowledge exchange about the Flash Plattform closer to your doorstep: on Tuesday, November 17th, we will get together in the office of kind host and interactive media agency "nothing from outer space" in Bern-Wabern and as usual we have some splendid talks and showcases lined up for you:

The opener is a showcase by Liiper Michel Wacker about "Lernfragen 2.0", an Adobe Flash based presentation layer for Moodle, which is supposed to bring a visually and interactively enhanced experience to the users of this OpenSource Learn Management System. Get an impression of how we used Interfaces and Flex Modules to keep the view completely separate from the core logic and thus exchangeable.

After that nothing's Weyert de Boer will talk about the future of Flash on mobile devices such as Palm Pre, Android and Symbian and of course the iPhone as announced in October 2009 at Adobe MAX, LA. Moreover, Weyert will provide tweaks for optimizing for these plattforms and compares Flash Player 10.1 to Flash Lite 3.1

So be there or be square! Come join us and the complete Liip Fribourg Flash Fraction at this meeting and show us that Berne craves Flash talk as much as Zurich does. It's free, it's fun and once again, there will be beer :)

When: November 17, 2009 from 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Where: nothing from outer space, Kirchstrasse 175, CH-3084 Bern-Wabern

Find more details on Adobe Groups. And once you're there, sign up, join the SFUG and become a part of one of the 10 biggest Adobe communities in Europe!

See you next week!