Freek.dev

Following the conclusion of the 24 Days in December series on PHP, I originally posted my own 24 “Heroes of PHP”™ on Twitter.

I’m reproducing that list here, together with some additional explanation of why these individuals mean so much to me.

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These are just some of my personal heroes, inspirations and role models, I’m sure that you have your own “Heroes of PHP”; but they all deserve thanks for the time and effort that they devote to improving our lives as PHP developers.

http://markbakeruk.net/2016/01/26/heroes-of-php-1/

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Thys Feryn, one of the organisers of the PHPBenelux conference, wrote a lengthy article about what it takes to organize a big conference.

The PHPBenelux Conference edition 2016 took place last week in Antwerpen (Belgium). As an organizer, I’m really happy with the end result. I like to think that our attendees, speakers and sponsors also enjoyed it. It’s the 7th time we organize the PHPBenelux Conference and every year we try to introduce something new. Although the 7 years of experience and the well-organized crew have made it a lot easier to organize, it’s still a lot of work.

This post gives you a behind the scenes look at what it takes to organize the PHPBenelux Conference. It will reflect our passion, our strengths and our weaknesses.

https://blog.feryn.eu/making-the-phpbenelux-conference-happen/

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This Friday the PHP Benelux Conference will kick off. It has an excellent line up and I'll probably blog about the sessions I will see there.

Last year the keynote of the conference was given by Yitzchok Willroth aka Coderabbi. He emphasizes on the power of the community. It was a great talk, I even dare to use the word "inspirational". In the weeks and months after his talk numerous PHP user groups were formed in my home country, Belgium. I believe this was no coincidence.

A few days ago a video of this talk (given at another conference) was published. You can watch it below.

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Anthony Ferrara gave a excellent "state of php"-talk at php[world].

PHP is experiencing a renaissance; old methodologies are everywhere under assault from advances in tooling and design. From Composer to HackLang, "the PHP way" of solving problems is dramatically evolving. Walls between projects are falling; interoperability and collaboration are happening on levels never thought possible. What do these accelerating changes mean for the future of the language? What might PHP8 look like? How will our communities continue to collaborate and evolve? And most pressing: what steps can we take to ensure PHP's continuing vibrancy in the face of future technical challenges?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWTe-iswnqc

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Maxime Fabre has created the best RFC tracker out there. I'll probably use his tracker more than then the official pages.

The PHP internals need to be improved, it's not new, I know it, you know it. Between the wiki, the dozens of mailing lists, the Github repository and so on, information is spread out across the web; difficult to access, to comprehend, and to participate in. If you're not familiar with it, it's an unwelcoming world to whomever might want to know more about advances in the PHP language.

This tool aims to simplify this by unifying sources of information under one roof, and answer all the questions people might have about the PHP internals. Who voted on what? Who even are the people voting? What did they also vote on? What comments were made on a particular RFC? And so on.

http://why-cant-we-have-nice-things.mwl.be/

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One of the most important endeavors in the PHP universe is the PHP Framework Interop group. The group consists of several maintainers of big PHP projects. Their aim is to find commonalities between their projects and find ways to work together. They do this by proposing and accepting PSR's, short for PHP Standard Recommendation.

One of the most important PSR's is PSR-4 (and the now deprecated PSR-0) which describes a way to autoload classes. Thanks to this standard packages can be easily be reused in many frameworks and projects. PSR-2 is another important one. It is a coding style guide and greatly improves readabiltiy of code when working with a bunch of developers. There are several other PSR's that have been accepted.

Today PHP-FIG published their new site. It features a beautiful design by Jonathan Reinink (he's the designer of the PHP League sites, author of Glide, and creator of the PHP Package checklist). If you use PHP in any way you owe it to yourself to check it out the new site.

 

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The past few months, I've been trying out some podcasts. Listening to them is an easy way to learn about and stay in touch with the sprawling range of topics that could interest a developer. These are my favourites:

The Laravel Podcast

The Laravel podcast focusses on Laravel (of course) and the latests trends in the PHP world. The podcast is hosted by Matt Stauffer. Jeffrey Way and Taylor Otwell are regular guests. Recently the format of the show was changed: episodes are now around 30 minutes in length, which I think is great.

Listen in iTunes Follow on Twitter

Full Stack Radio

This podcast isn't narrowly focused on one subject. In each episode Adam Watham interviews one guest. Topics range from product design to system administration and everything in between. To give you an idea: the last episodes saw Adam Culp talking about conferences, Kent Beck about application architecture and Konstantin Kudryashov about BDD and TDD.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

Dev Discussions

In this podcast Shawn McCool talks with other webapplication dev's mainly about programming concepts. Past episodes touched functional programming, event sourcing, ActiveRecord and Datamapper. Shawn recently recorded a talk with Mathias Verraes and Ross Tuck. Let's hope it gets published soon.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

PHP Roundtable

The roundtable was created by Sammy Kaye Powers. On each episode several developers discuss various topics concerning PHP and it's ecosystem.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

I'm sure there are many other great podcasts out there. If you know one, please let me (and the other readers of this blog) know in the comments below.

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Over at the Fortrabbit blog you'll find a great list containing various influencers of the PHP ecosystem.

... we have to have an eye on future trends. So we are monitoring what’s going on in the open source PHP world. It’s fun watching all those interesting projects out there. But it’s not about technology only. You’ll need to know about the people driving the projects to understand what’s going on. What are the visible, vocal & visionary PHPeople up to?

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