My name is Shahar (he: שחר), and this is my blog.
I grew up and live in Israel – currently in Tel Aviv, but I grew up in Mattat, a small village in Israel’s northern Galilee. I am a technology enthusiast, and like building and taking apart things so that I can understand them better, be that physical things, software and even people.
I also take much interest in philosophy and history, and enjoy sea kayaking (I have one of the first NDK Romany kayaks ever made, which I regularly paddle around Tel Aviv’s Mediterranean coast), hiking and traveling – all of which I consider great ways to see the world and gain fist-hand experiences with nature and people.
Over the years, I have gained a lot of experience in Web infrastructure, and specifically in designing, building, optimizing and managing Web applications on the LAMP (that’s Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL) stack. I’ve also gained some experience with other related technologies – frontend stuff (JavaScript, HTML and CSS), as well as server side stuff (other web servers such as lighttpd and nginx, non-relational databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB). I also have some experience with other programming languages – some C, some Python and just a little bit of Java.
I am a strong believer that good software is rarely based on technological merits. Working for the past few years as a product manager, I consider myself a product person more than a developer – and I always try to start from the user persona, workflows and usability before diving into the code on a new project.
I love open source and free software. I strongly believe in sharing thoughts and ideas with others, and software is not different. Over the years I’ve started and contributed to different free software projects.
I am currently self-employed and am trying to split my time between work (personal projects and freelance consulting work) and my hobbies. Feel free to comment on my posts or contact me through this blog if you need my help, want to hire me or just have some questions.
Click here to download my CV (175k PDF, English)
Hi Shahar,
I came upon your website rather randomly. I’m not much of a techie but I enjoyed reading about your travels and am curious about what it was like to grow up in such a small village. If you’re even in San Francisco, I’d love to show you around my foggy beautiful city.
I look forward to reading more of your blog!
-Anita
San Francisco, CA
Hi – Thanks!
In fact I’ve been to SF once, I have family there – and I have to say It’s one of the pretiest cities I’ve been to, very close to nature, plus it has that “edge of western civilazation” feeling.
It’s nice to know some non-techies read my blog as well – if you’re interested, you can always subscribe to my non-tech feeds, most of my “other” posts go into http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/category/people-places/feed or http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/category/thoughts-possibilities/feed
Shahar.
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Dear Shahar,
first of all congratulations to your new job!
I’m posting here because I can’t find your mail address and despite “If you have any comments, I’ll be happy to hear them.” the comments to
http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/45
are disabled.
Are your very useful (but duplicated) slides of 17 Oct 2007 still current?
http://devzone.zend.com/article/3150-Slides-link-is-from-2007
Greetings from Germany
René
Hi René,
Yes – the slides have not changed since October. I actually really enjoyed giving that talk, and might update it once in a while if I have opportunities to give it at other conferences.
For now – they are the same as they were when I gave them at ZendCon07.
BTW comments are disabled on that post just because it has been more than a couple of months since it was posted. They get locked automatically to avoid spamming.
Shahar.
Hi Shahar,
It is refreshing to feel the wisdom of the ages, expressing itself through your words. It is maybe partially because you come from a family of philosophers !? but more importantly it is for sure due to who you are in Truth… A pure and sincere heart !
May 2009, brings you the opportunity to offer all your gifts to Life and to the world !
Laurent… your friend from Paris
Hi Shahar
I’m posting here as I couldn’t find a mail address and comments are closed, but regarding your Finding Apache’s Memory Usage post, the following command should avoid the PHP requirement.
ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v ^root | awk '{ print $2 '} | xargs pmap -d | grep ^mapped: | awk '{ print $4 }' | cut -dK -f1 | awk '{ SUM += $1} END { print SUM/NR }'I know it’s old but I hope it helps!
Karl