It hit 30C here this week, which meant we broke out the AC units at 383 Towers. Luckily next week I’m going to Budapest where it’s expected to hit 38C, but with a 100% chance of baths. Which is all a roundabout way of saying this week’s links are been written in the Sun and next week’s links are going to be sparse.

The Zero-Armed Bandit – Technically, this is related to tech. And technically is the best kind of thing, so this is obviously the first link. The lengths a guy went to with a physical device, let down by the execution.

Inside Azure Search – Nice to see how the big behemoth is adapting to changing times. I still remember the time when Windows Server meant big iron to avoid license costs.

Frameworkless, or How I use PHP – This is how all of my little apps run. A single front controller calling out where needed. I’d argue you don’t even need the IoC container.

Sublime Text for PHP Developers – Ergh, IDEs. Some of them are awesome (Visual Studio). Most of them are utter shit (Eclipse, Xcode). With packages, you can put all the bits you need into something fast and nimble.

Locust – Load testing is a pretty standard requirement for most new projects now. Anything less than 2K req/sec from a box is probably not gonna cut it in production. This looks like a good way to configure the tests (and make them versionable).

The NoScript Misnomer – Just like with the root CAs, you can only trust something as far as you can trust everyone else in the chain.

Phan – From the creator of PHP, a way to statically test PHP. I doubt this can do much more than a basic AST-walk though ultimately.

Chalk – Having used Node for the past few weeks, this is a beautiful little library for outputting stuff on the command line.

Beyond upsert – Postgres is making a resurgence (even though I’m still a MySQL man). The new features are awesome (though jsonb is nearly in Maria anyway now).

Thoughts on Time-series Databases – And last but not least, some more theory on databases. Never forget; smart data + dumb code, never dumb data & smart code.