From the article:

You can think of WebFinger as an email-centric cousin of OpenID. While OpenID associates your identity with a URL, WebFinger links your identity to your email address. WebFinger can store metadata about your account and make it publicly accessible. This data can include your public profile data, information about other services that are used by this email address, a URL to your avatar, or - if you choose so - a declaration that this address doesn’t have any metadata associated with it. The WebFinger metadata can also point to an alternative identity provider, which can be an OpenID server.

Charlotte Gainsbourg produced by Beck. Sounds pretty sweet.

If you are the type that likes to zone out to music and code this is for you.

I love these types of articles because they get to the heart of how scaling can be accomplished.

The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It’s more likely that you see if (…) {…} else {..} than it is to see function foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory.

The transformation process includes three main steps:

1. Static analysis where we collect information on who declares what and dependencies,
2. Type inference where we choose the most specific type between C++ scalars, String, Array, classes, Object, and Variant, and
3. Code generation which for the most part is a direct correspondence from PHP statements and expressions to C++ statements and expressions.

Rendering Markdown faster is always awesome.

Javascript has such an incredibly bright future; on the web and off its making huge waves. Check out the slides and download the PDF for some source code to see how realtime web applications can be built right now.

Cool solution to the problem.