Dev

Running an out-of-the-box stack like MAMP may be fine for part-time tinkerers, but if you're writing code for a serious site you'll quickly realise that it's important to develop against the same version of the stack that's running in the production environment. You'd be amazed at how many subtle bugs emerge between two minor point releases of PHP, APC, MySQL or any other of the myriad components. Catching them early is crucial, and the easiest way to do that is to use a virtualised developer environment. …