8 ms·

PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay (YC S09)

100 points by trefn 16y ago

trefn 16y ago
congrats guys, that's huge. i hope you see a large influx of resumes.
breck 16y ago
Very cool. Do you guys do most of your backend logic in PHP as well, or just the website?
- billclerico 16y ago
  when we first started, basically the entire application was php. over time we have introduced other various languages in different places
  - vijayr 16y ago
    which ones? and at what layers?
jfong 16y ago
Nice find!
strlen 16y ago
Congratulations on the hire. Even though I dislike PHP and avoid primarily-PHP projects (which excludes me from something like 75% of all start-ups, but was fine at Yahoo where many teams used Java/C++/Perl for backend/middleware work), I can only say good things about his contributions at Yahoo which went beyond PHP work e.g., educating engineers on web security.
- rufugee 16y ago
  75% of startups? Really? Where'd you get this number?
  - jeromec 16y ago
    Browse this list of HN contractors/developers and see how many did not list PHP. I think it's safe to guess around 75% have it. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
    - strlen 16y ago
      It's not meant to be a scientifically precise number and I used in a half serious way (hence "something like"), but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. I should clarify: I'd have no issue working at start-up that used PHP for front-end web development, as long as they used a more appropriate language for backend/middleware. This is the approach taken by Yahoo and Facebook, although it's not one I'd take personally. I suspect most Facebookers would agree: there were several attempts to switch, but carrying them through would have meant halting site development; most wish Facebook chose a different language from the start. That's called technical debt and they're choosing to keep paying interest on it (writing a PHP to C++ translator) for the time being for very solid reasons (OTOH, PHP performance wasn't an issue as much at Yahoo as they made much heavier use of custom C/C++ extensions). In another way, PHP had a positive effect on Facebook: as it's a limited language, there's much greater motivation to create a distributed and polyglot architecture e.g., breaking the back and middle layers out into separate services and using Thrift RPC, as opposed to either keeping the architecture monolithic (creating a scalability bottleneck) or sending raw C structs or serialized Java Objects over the wire (assuming the network is homogenous is one of the fallacies of distributed computing). Sometimes worse is better. As for myself, I'm neither good at nor interested in web development (although I have tons of respect for great front-end people), which make me useless if 95% of a ten person start-up's engineering work consisted of web development. If the start-up was using PHP exclusively (without any custom C extensions) for tasks beyond web development (e.g., building the backend for what is essentially a recommender system), it would be a strong indicator of a technical team being ignorant and unaware of it (e.g., not realizing that what they're trying can be done elegantly through singular value matrix decomposition, something incredibly painful if not impossible to do purely in PHP) or being micro-managed. If you read Paul Graham, an advantage of early stage start-ups over bigger companies is greater freedom in technology choice, joining a start-up that restricts you to what you think is decidedly the wrong tool for the job is counter intuitive.
- rokhayakebe 16y ago
  Funny thing. When you google your username the first result is the php function.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    strlen(3) first appeared in Reaserch Unix v7, circa January 1979: http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Trees/V7/usr/src/libc/gen/strlen.c http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-1...
  - strlen 16y ago
    Try using "man" instead, perhaps?
- davidw 16y ago
  I worked with Rasmus at Linuxcare, and he always came across as a really good person - a problem solver, and generally nice, and pleasant to be around. I don't care for PHP either, but that's another story, and in any case you have to give the guy credit for launching an open source project that ended up that big - he got something right, and it's worth studying to find out what.
whalesalad 16y ago
If anyone's ever used PHP, this sounds like the worst hire ever. I bet he's a smart guy, but you can gain some insight on his attitude towards development here -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests."
- omouse 16y ago
  That's not the worst hire, that's the normal hire! A lot of programmers are out there that are like that.
  - whalesalad 16y ago
    I used to work with a developer, about 2-3 years ago. He was originally CTO of a startup bought by Yahoo! back in the day (Hotjobs). He'd develop live on the server, no version control, yap at you over IM or across the room to get out of the file that he was editing, restart Apache every few seconds to get mod_python to reload. It was absolute chaos. He's a great hacker and a brilliant guy, but some people are truly shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of being "old school". It all comes down to a stubborn laziness. There's definitely a balance between sticking to what you know and prematurely ejaculating over the latest and greatest technologies. Some people just refuse to use new things.
    - nir 16y ago
      Google "Rasmus Lerdorf". Look at some of his presentations & posts (which btw are impressively ego-free, compared to the usual output of web mini-celebs which achieved a lot less). He's far from being stupid or lazy, but like any good developer knows that thinking of yourself as stupid and acting lazy are virtues that force you to build simple stuff that works.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet. Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.
iamelgringo 16y ago
I've been hanging out with the WePay guys since shortly after they moved to Silicon Valley. They are really great guys. I also happened to meet Rasmus at WePay's launch party, and he impressed the socks off me with how laid back and unassuming he was. We talked for about half an hour about the history of PHP. I learned a bunch and wanted to hang out with the guy a lot more. I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the http://HackersandFounders.com http://HackersandFounders.com meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer money between members of my family. I have no skin in their game aside from really liking the guys. If you're interested in working for a great startup that has amazing potential, you should really send WePay your resume.
hussong 16y ago
Awesome hire, congrats, Bill and Rich! Looking forward to your API.
rythie 16y ago
I've seen Rasmus speak twice and talked to him once. He certainly is very interested in APIs. It seems a theme of his to hack a mashup together with an API that exposes information that wasn't previously available. I would guess that this post is more about his passion for APIs than it is about PHP.
leftnode 16y ago
Congrats to both! I think it's important to realize while there are a lot of valid criticisms with PHP (likewise with other popular languages), there are still a great many intelligent developers and programmers in the PHP community. Once you wade through a lot of the cruft (and there's a lot of it), you'll hear from some really intelligent people who use PHP.

100 points by trefn 16y ago

trefn 16y ago

congrats guys, that's huge. i hope you see a large influx of resumes.

breck 16y ago

Very cool. Do you guys do most of your backend logic in PHP as well, or just the website?

billclerico 16y ago
when we first started, basically the entire application was php. over time we have introduced other various languages in different places
- vijayr 16y ago
  which ones? and at what layers?

jfong 16y ago

Nice find!

strlen 16y ago

Congratulations on the hire. Even though I dislike PHP and avoid primarily-PHP projects (which excludes me from something like 75% of all start-ups, but was fine at Yahoo where many teams used Java/C++/Perl for backend/middleware work), I can only say good things about his contributions at Yahoo which went beyond PHP work e.g., educating engineers on web security.

rufugee 16y ago
75% of startups? Really? Where'd you get this number?
- jeromec 16y ago
  Browse this list of HN contractors/developers and see how many did not list PHP. I think it's safe to guess around 75% have it. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
  - strlen 16y ago
    It's not meant to be a scientifically precise number and I used in a half serious way (hence "something like"), but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. I should clarify: I'd have no issue working at start-up that used PHP for front-end web development, as long as they used a more appropriate language for backend/middleware. This is the approach taken by Yahoo and Facebook, although it's not one I'd take personally. I suspect most Facebookers would agree: there were several attempts to switch, but carrying them through would have meant halting site development; most wish Facebook chose a different language from the start. That's called technical debt and they're choosing to keep paying interest on it (writing a PHP to C++ translator) for the time being for very solid reasons (OTOH, PHP performance wasn't an issue as much at Yahoo as they made much heavier use of custom C/C++ extensions). In another way, PHP had a positive effect on Facebook: as it's a limited language, there's much greater motivation to create a distributed and polyglot architecture e.g., breaking the back and middle layers out into separate services and using Thrift RPC, as opposed to either keeping the architecture monolithic (creating a scalability bottleneck) or sending raw C structs or serialized Java Objects over the wire (assuming the network is homogenous is one of the fallacies of distributed computing). Sometimes worse is better. As for myself, I'm neither good at nor interested in web development (although I have tons of respect for great front-end people), which make me useless if 95% of a ten person start-up's engineering work consisted of web development. If the start-up was using PHP exclusively (without any custom C extensions) for tasks beyond web development (e.g., building the backend for what is essentially a recommender system), it would be a strong indicator of a technical team being ignorant and unaware of it (e.g., not realizing that what they're trying can be done elegantly through singular value matrix decomposition, something incredibly painful if not impossible to do purely in PHP) or being micro-managed. If you read Paul Graham, an advantage of early stage start-ups over bigger companies is greater freedom in technology choice, joining a start-up that restricts you to what you think is decidedly the wrong tool for the job is counter intuitive.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
Funny thing. When you google your username the first result is the php function.
- mahmud 16y ago
  strlen(3) first appeared in Reaserch Unix v7, circa January 1979: http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Trees/V7/usr/src/libc/gen/strlen.c http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-1...
- strlen 16y ago
  Try using "man" instead, perhaps?
davidw 16y ago
I worked with Rasmus at Linuxcare, and he always came across as a really good person - a problem solver, and generally nice, and pleasant to be around. I don't care for PHP either, but that's another story, and in any case you have to give the guy credit for launching an open source project that ended up that big - he got something right, and it's worth studying to find out what.

whalesalad 16y ago

If anyone's ever used PHP, this sounds like the worst hire ever. I bet he's a smart guy, but you can gain some insight on his attitude towards development here -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests."

omouse 16y ago
That's not the worst hire, that's the normal hire! A lot of programmers are out there that are like that.
- whalesalad 16y ago
  I used to work with a developer, about 2-3 years ago. He was originally CTO of a startup bought by Yahoo! back in the day (Hotjobs). He'd develop live on the server, no version control, yap at you over IM or across the room to get out of the file that he was editing, restart Apache every few seconds to get mod_python to reload. It was absolute chaos. He's a great hacker and a brilliant guy, but some people are truly shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of being "old school". It all comes down to a stubborn laziness. There's definitely a balance between sticking to what you know and prematurely ejaculating over the latest and greatest technologies. Some people just refuse to use new things.
  - nir 16y ago
    Google "Rasmus Lerdorf". Look at some of his presentations & posts (which btw are impressively ego-free, compared to the usual output of web mini-celebs which achieved a lot less). He's far from being stupid or lazy, but like any good developer knows that thinking of yourself as stupid and acting lazy are virtues that force you to build simple stuff that works.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet. Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.

iamelgringo 16y ago

I've been hanging out with the WePay guys since shortly after they moved to Silicon Valley. They are really great guys. I also happened to meet Rasmus at WePay's launch party, and he impressed the socks off me with how laid back and unassuming he was. We talked for about half an hour about the history of PHP. I learned a bunch and wanted to hang out with the guy a lot more. I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the http://HackersandFounders.com http://HackersandFounders.com meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer money between members of my family. I have no skin in their game aside from really liking the guys. If you're interested in working for a great startup that has amazing potential, you should really send WePay your resume.

hussong 16y ago

Awesome hire, congrats, Bill and Rich! Looking forward to your API.

rythie 16y ago

I've seen Rasmus speak twice and talked to him once. He certainly is very interested in APIs. It seems a theme of his to hack a mashup together with an API that exposes information that wasn't previously available. I would guess that this post is more about his passion for APIs than it is about PHP.

leftnode 16y ago

Congrats to both! I think it's important to realize while there are a lot of valid criticisms with PHP (likewise with other popular languages), there are still a great many intelligent developers and programmers in the PHP community. Once you wade through a lot of the cruft (and there's a lot of it), you'll hear from some really intelligent people who use PHP.