You never know where and when you might land your dream job working at Twitter, Google, GitHub, the White House, etc.

Modern web browsers put a cap on the number of connections they make to a host. This means if you've got a lot of assets on one hostname the browser will queue the remaining assets, while the ones in front download. This is referred to as blocking.

One way around blocking is to create multiple subdomains, for instance, assets0.davidstoline.com and assets1.davidstoline.com to increase the number of resources downloaded in parallel. This is method is called domain sharding and it is recommended by both Google's PageSpeed and Yahoo's YSlow.

I can't exactly afford a high quality CDN like Akamai but I can still leverage some of the benefits and fun of using a CDN. My friend Wim Leers wrote the Drupal CDN module, which you can leverage to do a little home grown sharding of your own.

Skills: Theoretical Advanced Knowledge of HTML and CSS. I'm going to let that phrase sink in for a while. *deep breath, okay continue*

I've seen that on a resume for a Web Designer before. Unbelievable right?It is actually refreshingly honest as most Web Designers only work as theorists.

I've worked with a lot of web designers over the years. Most of them work in Photoshop and pass off their PSD's to front-end developers for the implementation. Usually, a lot of back and forth commences between the two as the front-end guy has to deal with forgotten items such as roll-overs, UX, error states, etc. Maybe the front-end guy doesn't get the PSD's until after the client has approved the designs. Good luck buddy.

This back and forth costs business a lot of money. Every project, every page comp, every client, every time. It adds up quickly. I'm putting Web Designers on notice, if you can't build your design in HTML and CSS, you're a Theoretical Web Designer (TWD).

I thought it would be a good idea to get together with some folks at DrupalCon Chicago for a code sprint for Taxonomy Menu.

I've posted a meta issue in the queue to gauge people's interest, which seems to have paid off already! More details will be posted to the issue queue as I figure them out.

XHProf is a hierarchical profiler for PHP. It reports function-level call counts and inclusive and exclusive metrics such as wall (elapsed) time, CPU time and memory usage. A function's profile can be broken down by callers or callees. The raw data collection component is implemented in C as a PHP Zend extension called xhprof. XHProf has a simple HTML based user interface (written in PHP). The browser based UI for viewing profiler results makes it easy to view results or to share results with peers. A callgraph image view is also supported.

So you're sold, but getting it installed in MAMP is kind of a pain.

A little about my setup system first. I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.4 with MAMP 1.9.2 with php 5.2.13 and you'll need Xcode.