Parthenon is now available under GPLv3 and the Skeleton Application is available under the MIT License. When I was doing sales calls with companies about Parthenon part of the risk factor was what if I decided this project wasn't viable as a business. Every time, I said I would open source the code and continue to work on it. Well, I decided a year ago that I needed to change my approach and focus on a single area instead of trying to solve lots of problems as Parthenon does. So I created BillaBear, which uses Parthenon, to focus on billing. Which is actually building the billing system I want ..read more

Hiring developers can be tricky: they’re a long term investment, they take 6 months to onboard, and in order to get the best out of them you need to employ them for several years. In today’s market everyone wants the best developers, so to ensure that you don’t have Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google (FAANG) knocking on your developers’ doors, you need to make sure that you don’t hire the best that there is. To help you do that, we’ve got some tips on how to weed out the crème de la crème of the developer world, so you can hire developers who have nowhere else to go. To skim look for ..read more

In software development, free open-source software (FOSS) has always been important and without FOSS, IT would not be the same as it is today. It is hard to think of a company in this world today that isn’t relying on FOSS for part of its tech stack. For many developers, FOSS is a major part of being a developer and they feel like contributing to FOSS is something they, as a good developers, must do. Some loath the idea of commercial software. So it’s with this in mind, we feel like we should explain why we choose not to use the FOSS model. Instead, we have gone for commercial licensing. We wa ..read more

I've started to document the design decisions made for Parthenon. One of the main decisions made was to make classes that aren't meant to be extended to be final. There are many schools of thought when it comes to development. With many people having different opinions about when and why to use final classes, I thought I would add my opinion to the mix. Decision​ The decision was made to make classes that aren't meant to be extended final. All final classes should have an interface that matches their publicly available methods. Open/Closed Principle​ Some people like SOLID principles, and some ..read more

Today is the release of Parthenon 2.1. It's a small release putting in some nice little features before big drive to build a powerful billing system starts. It has one key feature which is the Data Export Module. Which I think will be super useful to companies that deal with data exports from their system. Then there are a few minor features which will help will small little issues. Data Export Module​ If you've worked on a production system, you've almost certainly had to deal with data exports. Data export are maybe the most loved and sometimes most important feature within an application. T ..read more

Today we're announcing the release of Parthenon 2.0. With this release, there are updates like all other releases. But the main change is that Parthenon is now available under the Business Source License. This means that it is now free to use Parthenon for non-production use, such as: development, testing, and evaluation. We're also granting an additional usage for production use to those generating less than $5,000 US Dollars a month. Previously, Parthenon was only available for a fee. What is Parthenon​ Maybe you're here for the first time, so I'll try and explain what Parthenon is and what ..read more

I'm month two into my 6-month project to build 6 SaaS applications in 6 months. I started work on the 2nd SaaS a month ago, and it's Blether.chat - a GDPR Compliant Live Chat that integrates with Slack. How did I come up with the idea for Blether? I hate cookie consent banners so I don't want to have them on my site, but at the same time, I wanted to be able to chat with potential customers for Parthenon. Therefore I needed one that would allow me to do that without adding a cookie banner. The answer is Blether. Development​ In the past, I had been able to create an MVP in about 7-days, mainly ..read more

If you want to operate within the EU you need to follow the strict data privacy law, GDPR. And many of use are searching for the best GDPR compliance tools. Some of the things you need to pay attention to with GDPR are: Cookie and Localstorage usage Where the data is stored If processing personal data without need Where the company is based. GDPR Compliant Live Chat​ Blether​ Hosted in the EU, and only stores and processes data it needs to and doesn't use cookies. Website: https://www.blether.chat GDPR Compliant Cloud Hosting​ Cloud Hosting is extremely popular. However, the main providers a ..read more

A few days ago I saw someone ask if Sylius was a good eCommerce system to use, which it is. And my first thought to head was "Of course because it's Symfony based." then I wondered what the options and systems built on Laravel and thought it would be interesting to list out were. So here we are. I'll go through the systems I know of for various categories for both Symfony and Laravel. eCommerce - Symfony​ Sylius​ The eCommerce system that sparked the idea for this list because I automatically linked it with being built on Symfony components. Sylius to me also links up with being built on Symfo ..read more

I'm currently developing a cookieless Free Live Chat SaaS - Blether.chat and as part of the development process, I decided to stress test the application and really see the difference PHP OP Cache preload made to the request per second in a real-world application. This led me down a path that resulted in me making a configuration change unrelated to the OP Cache resulting in an almost 100% increase in throughput and adding 200+ requests per second to my server's capabilities. What is PHP OP Cache? First, I'll quickly explain what the OP Cache in PHP is and what preload is. PHP is an interprete ..read more