Time to check in with the geeks It isn’t very often that you hear from the geeks on Union Street Media’s blog. We hide deep in the shadows, developing the web app that you’ve come to know and love; surfacing every once and awhile to fix a bug or introduce a new wizbang feature. Recently the geeks at Union Street Media went on a field trip to Boston to commune with like-minded individuals at the first ever Northeast PHP conference, held at the aptly named Microsoft NERD Center (New England Research and Design). This conference focused on web design as a whole with tracts in user experience, PHP development and other associated technologies. PHP is the programming language that the majority of our platform is built on, so it is a subject of great importance to us. Northeast PHP was a great opportunity for our team to mine the brain trust that gathered for this event, with such heavyweights as PHP core developer Ilia Alshanetsky, user experience evangelist Jared Spool and VT’s own superstar Bradley Holt in attendance. Individuals came from far and wide to attend and speak, some even as far as the Netherlands. We even got to meet an individual that is close to some of our clients’ hearts: Debra Blair from LINK MLS.

So we went to Boston, we talked code, we shared ideas — why do you care to read this? Well, just for fun I brought some charts! Yes, charts and fun in the same sentence. Like I said, this was a great opportunity to gain knowledge, and on returning we were able to use some of this knowledge towards windfall gains in site speed. From a side comment by Redis expert Ross Tuck our team was able to manifest a 10X speed increase in MLS search. This increase is gigantic and is only one of many ideas spurred by this conference. Northeast PHP was a forum for ideas that we’ll be able to use to help your site work for you.