The first two years of University turned out to be relatively simple (to be honest I was in the lucky position of having covered most of the material prior to arriving). But this third and final year, now just under than two months from completion, has stepped up to another level.

I used to believe PHP was the greatest thing ever. Fool I know, though I believe it definitely has its uses. I used to think that every app I built was going to 'change the world'. Oh how wrong! And let's not forget I attempted to build a browser game using div's, just after canvas became viable for browser-graphics (and was exploding in popularity). Whoops.

As part of my final year dissertation I've been learning about building web servers & apps using Lua, LuaJIT, LuaJIT+Nginx & Node. Because it's relatively simple to implement a basic HTTP server in each, I decided to run some benchmarks to compare them.

Setup/Notes

• Nginx+LuaJIT has 1 worker process
• All three are 'non-blocking' on IO operations
• Each is set to only write "hello world"
• Mostly looking at requests/s in results

For the last six years this domain has been serving up my blog using Wordpress as the backend. Ignoring a couple of re-installs, today is the first day it's no longer Wordpress. I was 16 when I started this blog, just starting to learn PHP. During these years the site has undergone six different designs I can find on archive.org. The site has always (and probably will always be) been more of a testing ground than a blog.

During these years I've gone through school and 2/3's University (finish this July year), looked at and played with tonnes of different languages (PHP, Javascript, Java, Lua & so on) and started a small business: Afterburst. In July I'll be free to move almost anywhere in the world. It's an exciting prospect, I've visited a number of towns (Banff, Queenstown, Melbourne) for extended periods of time; but there's always been University waiting for me in the UK.

I want to become a better blogger over the next few months, I want to learn to construct better, more interesting content. Step one to becoming a better blogger? Use blogging software. Wordpress is a CMS now. So I threw together Luapress, another one of these static blog generators. It's extremely minimal, the entire site is made from 5 templates (head, foot, post, page & archive) and only supports simple date-ordered posts across multiple indexes, single pages and single posts. The archive is a 'special' page. Aside from else there's very little to it, a few markdown files and a small config file.

So, assuming all goes to plan, stay tuned for more regular blogging!