Symphony.

Last week on our developer podcast, Alistair and I spoke about taking Symphony into the next phase. We mentioned that the system has gone through a five year live-cycle and has been put through its paces on large-scale, high load websites and has come out better, stronger and awesomer with each iteration. The community has also grown with us over the years -- in a linear and non-server crashing rate -- now able to co-develop Symphony alongside the core team. And now we want to take that next logical step: thinking business.

We start our journey with Symphony compatible hosts.

Update: Anyone who tried to send us an application recently, can you please resend them. Apologies for the fail. -- Allen

Hot on the heels of Craig coming on board, we're now looking for a junior>mid weight developer to join us as a full time member of our support team. It's a real job; we'll give you money for it.

I'll spare the suspense and cut right to the chase: A long long time ago, in a forest far far away...

I kid, I kid.

Here's the scoop -- as of today, Craig Zheng joins our team! When I said we have something planned, this was it. As many of you know, Craig has been developing with Symphony before I was even born. How is that possible you ask? It's not, but cut my exaggeration by 10 fold and you still get, "a Symphony veteran, whose name is Craig" or something to that effect. What Craig has, something which the rest of the team lacked, was his way with words. And no, Craig didn't try to woo me -- as you trendy kids would say; well, not wittingly at least. Rather, he is a very articulate person and really gets Symphony. Just look at the slab of testimonial with his beautiful words carved on the homepage.

When the elders of an ancient forgotten tribe played with their rain sticks to see if their year-long drought would be graced with rain this season, they've made a misstep in their ritual dance and accidentally foretold that Symphony 2 would arrive today - and it was true.

Tickle-me Elmo tickles URL parameters right back with a vengeance to improve.

To kick off the Symphony 2 preview series in motion, we start by looking at the last piece of the system’s puzzle.

This show is about a boy (Allen) who learns true magic (Symphony 2) and the challenges he and his friends faced against 3 evil entities: Bloat, Inefficiency and Learning Curve.

Allen talks about the challenges the team faced with the current state of Symphony and the solutions they've implemented for version 2; presented in a format known to the academics as "lectures I rather skip". Be warned, attendance will be marked against your final grade. Get the keynote presentation now or forever hold your peace with a B+ at best.

To celebrate the release of the iPhone, we are giving away free copies of Symphony! Incidentally, the Symphony blog is celebrating the release of the The Big Noob interview podcast by giving away 3 Noob T-shirts.

Symphony is soon reaching version 1.8. It’s over two years old and it’s been around its fair share of blocks. Symphonians now expect more features, greater stability and fewer bugs. The Symphony team is every bit as committed to these but because of it, we sometimes lose sight of existing features that need a little bit of tender, love and care. Each of the members in the Symphony development team have their own pet peeve with the system that we vow to one day fix. In this article, I will illustrate one of my pet peeves.