NYCPHP Meetup

[Matthew Terenzio]

Quick story:

I work for a local newspaper website, but we are a big News 
Corporation. Lots of money and lots of Java technology.

We are about a month behind schedule for a launch of a hosted 
obituaries solution with an outside vendor.

The IT department was working on a feed script. I asked how it was 
going.

"We are really busy. we may have to hire someone from outside to write 
it. "
I heard this as "it's tougher than I thought, I don't know regular 
expressions very well."
I don't know this worker well, though I heard he is a Solaris snob. (I 
have nothing against Solaris, only his disregard for FreeBSD and Linux)

"Do you want to take a look at it?" they asked.
"Okay, " I said, "what platform is it running on.?"
"Unix or Mac OS X." (lots of Macs in the Printing business)

That was at ten a.m.
By  the time I left, PHP had it working.
I probably could have done it without preg_match , but I used it anyway 
as it  made it more flexible.

Now I probably saved the company a thousand dollars, the IT project 
manager a headache, and myself some drudgery, since we upload the obits 
manually every day till this gets launched.

But I won't even get a free lunch.

It's running on an OS X server, so PHP was installed already.
I saw the IT director.
"hey, did you hear about that script I wrote for you guys? blah blah"
"really, what did you write it in?"
"PHP."
"What's that?"

"OOooh that hurts."