Ian Littman

When he isn’t building or maintaining web applications (usually APIs) for a variety of contract clients or helping organize AustinPHP, Ian’s probably at, or biking to or from, one of Austin, Texas’s 24-hour coffee shops, or opining some aspect of transportation infrastructure.

twitter: @iansltx

Articles

Load Testing Your App with K6

By Ian Littman

You have unit and integration tests to ensure your application operates as intended and you don’t have to test in production. What happens (or fails to happen) when a large number of users wants to take advantage of your application’s functionality all at once? That’s where application performance testing comes in. Here, I’ll provide you with a list of things to think about (and watch out for) when simulating traffic to your site in a test environment, and pointers on using LoadImpact’s open-source K6 tool to do the job.

Published in Master of Puppets, September 2019

Don’t Wait; Generate!

By Ian Littman

Generators introduce sanity to the world of asynchronous, concurrent execution within a single process. In this article, we’ll look at what generators are, how they show up in PHP, and how they make concurrency a bit more sane compared to callback and promise alternatives. Then, we’ll see what a PHP application looks like when built on top of a generator-based framework instead of the typical “run one process per request and block on I/O” approach.

Published in Setting Up to Succeed, January 2018