first of all, April Fools'
wow.
$
shahyarg thought it'd be "funny" if the deviantHEART matchup super-secret-sauce first sent a tiny chunk of traffic my way (or $
haldron's) before doing its magic
result? hundreds of notes and comments, and 3500 pageviews, about 3450 more than my daily average. I replied to a good chunk of notes and comments, but I still have some 120 to get through. I've attempted to reply to anyone who put more effort in than just sending the default message, even though I replied to a bunch of those as well. If I never get to yours, sorry, it really was an overwhelming amount of traffic.
I do think this years prank was one of the best I've ever experienced on dA (as staff, and before that, as a regular deviant), it is definitely my favorite (not just because I got buried in notes and comments
) and I think it did the best job of getting the community to interact with eachother directly instead of collecting everyone in one place.
if you felt "everyone" got sent to my page, you should go tell $
shahyarg just how unfunny he is, he'll appreciate it.
second, I have some amazing personal news.
the organizers of phpDay, an international PHP conference held in Italy (Verona) in May, have accepted my talk proposal and will be covering my expenses to come out and speak at their conference.
the topic of the talk is "LAMP scaling 101", LAMP meaning Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP - the most popular technology stack on the web today, and scaling meaning the art of making things work when half the planet decides to visit your website.
I have already delivered this talk at a ZGPHP user group meeting, but to a much smaller audience, in Croatian, and because it was an informal gathering and noone booed me off stage, I rambled on for I think a full hour before running out of slides. So the challenges here will be: redoing the slides, cause they sucked, translating the whole thing back to english, throwing out less interesting bits and compressing the thing down to a manageable duration. I don't even know how long my time slot is, I believe it's about half an hour.
I attended phpDay (and jsDay) last year, at the same venue, and it was amazing. About half a dozen people from Croatia came out, and a handful from Serbia, and we had a blast. Notable speakers were Rasmus Lerdorf (original author of PHP), Zeev Suraski (from Zend), Derick Rethans (of xdebug and mongodb fame), etc. Etsy flew its entire dev team from the US to attend the conference, github sent two guys... This year I believe at least 15-20 people from Croatia are driving out to Italy (that I know of), so it's gonna be badass
The acceptance email got lost to a spam filter somewhere, so I didn't really find out until way after they released the initial talk list. I was bummed to find I was not on it, but then I saw a tweet from the organizers saying they were sending out rejection letters and I didn't get that either, so I was very confused. Fortunately, one of the organizers reached out to me directly via email and let me know my talk has been accepted. It'd be an understatement to say I was speechless.
it won't be my first tech talk, it won't be my first talk in english, but it is raising the bar. Next stop: ?
Sta.sh
I've always liked the concept behind More Like This, despite how some have given it a rather negative reception. I think it is much more helpful and useful than the nay-sayers give it credit for. I really appreciate the work you guys do for the site, and I hope you get more recognition for it in the future. You deserve it! 
