Liam Wiltshire

Liam is a UK based developer and the CTO at Tebex, a gCommerce company and game server monetization platform. From humble beginnings breaking things in Perl, Liam has tackled projects large and small, from brochure sites in WordPress to eCommerce sites in Magento and SaaS products in Laravel. Outside of CTO-ing, Liam is a father, musician, and is trying to learn the secret to actually having some spare time.

twitter: @l_wiltshire

Articles

Hands-On Machine Learning With PHP, Part Two

By Liam Wiltshire

Last month, we looked at how we can take our data and, using machine learning, categorize the data by groupings we’d already decided upon—spam, ham, fraudulent, good, etc. This usage is a great way to start, but you might quickly find you want to take things further. Perhaps this means analyzing the data differently, to come up with new relationships you hadn’t previously considered, or maybe you want to improve the accuracy of your results by avoiding some common pitfalls in machine learning. These are the questions we are addressing today, starting with a different approach to machine learning—unsupervised learning.

Published in Unsupervised Learning, May 2020

Hands-On Machine Learning With PHP, Part One

By Liam Wiltshire

When you’re dealing with data, sooner or later, someone is likely to ask about machine learning. Start researching machine learning, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you need to use Python or R, TensorFlow, or PyTorch. This doesn’t have to be the case! With PHP and some basic knowledge, we can start to experiment and learn from our data without needing to learn new languages or tools. This article looks at some common machine learning problems such as classification and clustering and, using a language we know and an excellent Composer package, php-ai/php-ml, to get you up and running with your data experiments.

Published in Machine Learning and OpenAPI, April 2020

We Need a Bigger Boat—Introduction to Scaling, Part Two

By Liam Wiltshire

If you have one successful month after another, then scaling becomes something you always have to be aware of. While optimizing your resource usage and scaling your web instances (covered last month) can get you so far, sooner or later you’ll need more. We’ve already discussed how databases are a common bottleneck, so this month we’ll see how to scale our database servers, and consider other ways of reducing the load.

Published in Building Bridges, March 2019

We Need a Bigger Boat—Introduction to Scaling, Part One

By Liam Wiltshire

Scaling can be a tricky subject. We’re often warned against scaling too soon but left too late, and the results can be just as bad. The need to scale comes from an application being successful—so if you are in that situation, then congratulations! In this first part, we’ll cover how to know when its time to scale and ways to scale your web and PHP application servers.

Published in Out on a Limb – February 2019, February 2019