2012 Year in Review

Wow!  I can’t believe 2013 is coming.  It seriously feels just the other day when I sat down and wrote my 2011 year in review…

Thinking back, 2012 is probably a more average year.  I don’t feel like anything new and major really happened in the industry that I was a part of.  However, in my personal life, I welcomed my third child in late October – hence the lack of website updates since I’ve been extremely busy with my growing family.

I guess the biggest accomplishment of this past year is two-fold, I’ve officially switched to a dedicated server hosting with Amazon EC2 and secondly, I’ve made the switch from good ol’ faithful Apache to the new up and coming Nginx (pronounced Engine-X).

This change has provided a significant increase on my sites overall speed, plus I removed WordPress from the front-end and implemented a friend’s framework leveraging SlimPHP and static files.  I’m still being a bit lazy and have yet to move all of my sites to this framework…which causes my server to have up-and-down load times due to the heavy lifting WordPress invokes on the server.

Since moving to a dedicated server, increasing my main sites performance, performance in itself has been quite important to me.  I’ve written several articles on load testing mysql, wrote a speed comparison tool to use with any performance-related articles.

Finally, to wrap up the last quarter of 2012, I’ve spent some time learning Node.js.  I also had the privilege to be the technical reviewer of my former co-workers book: Building Node Applications with MongoDB and Backbone which will be available real soon.

On to 2013 – now that we have survived yet another dooms day day – one thing that I will be striving for this year is to hopefully compare AJAX to make sites highly dynamic and interactive against Node.js’ IO socket connection.

AJAX has been used successfully for many years and is easy to scale horizontally by adding new web servers.  However, I don’t know how it compares to Node.js’ IO socket connection.  It doesn’t seem like it will scale horizontally as easily because given that it is a socket, it’s stateful versus a webserver that we always attempt to make stateless…

I hope to have those results, unless someone else already has them?