PHP Town Hall

This week Ben and Phil take some time to catch up on each others lives and let you listen in. Ben doesn’t remember how to code. Phil is leaving PHP for Rails. They’re both moving again.

Since we don’t have any cool tools to recommend this week you should buy our books to support the podcast:

Building Secure PHP Apps - Ben Edmunds

Build APIs You Won’t Hate - Phil Sturgeon

PHP APIs and Security Bundle - Bundle of both books together

This week Ben and Phil are joined last minute by repeat guests Kayla Daniels and Matt Frost.

We talk waaaaay too much about hotdogs, Phil’s fun-employment, cocaine, and what’s new in PHP-land.

The recommended cool stuff of the episode is:

Dossier - super secret stealth mode project for managing talk abstracts

No Capes - Live Interviews with prominent speakers, community members and package developers in the PHP Community

WurstCon - The wurst conference in the US of A

SideSwell - beautiful side project execution tool

Treehouse - learn to program yo

This week Ben and Phil are joined by core PHP developer extraordinaires Andrea Faulds and Levi Morrison.

We discuss the new PHP engine spec, various RFCs, and all things internals. Also PHP 6 is officially dead, let’s have a moment of silence.

This week Ben and Phil are joined by long distance target shooter Paul M. Jones and the handsome man that is Daniel Lowrey, to talk about a whole bunch of PHP relating things.

Paul has recently been talking a lot about “Action Domain Responder” which is billed as a more representative

Daniel then goes on to talk about a few awesome topics, including some of the OpenSSL changes in 5.6, and a HTTP server he is working on built entirely from PHP. It’s async, non-blocking and web-scale.

We cover HTTP 2 and its effect on PHP, give some thoughts on PSR-7 HTTP Message, talk about Aura and finally when Phil could hold it no more, we had a big rant about PHP 6 v PHP 7 which - at the time - was still being voted on. The end result is of course that PHP 7 won.

I know I said no further comment, but I’m definitely gonna keep posting funny shit I see about this. Article 1. pic.twitter.com/cznAZLKiSd

Anyway. Here are a few extra links.

In this episode, Ben and Phil join forces with Loosely Coupled to talk about Open Source, burn out and briefly discuss their favorite open source projects. Jeff was out of action for a lot of it due to unexpected wifi troubles (in San Francisco of all places) so he sadly did not get to take part as much as he would have liked.

Questions this time around:

How do you deal nicely with someone who’s too reliant on you for solving problems and is too quick to ask you rather than figure it out themselves?

How do you guys explain OSS to non tech people? My wife finds it strange that I do work for “free”

As a contractor, how do you feel about “OSS” clauses (that your work can/will be open sourced) in contracts?

If you aren’t following Jeff and Matt then definitely go and do that:

The video is less edited than the audio, so download and listen for a slightly shorter and more relevant version.

This episode is a long one, but we are back to improved audio and the video is not just one dude eating pzza for an hour. Josh Lockhart of PHP The Right Way and Slim fame, and Jeremy Mikola who is well known for banging on about clouds and playing magic the gathering. Oh, he also works for MongoDB.

Warning: Puns and occasional swears.

Some projects have been discovering they use language which can be offensive like master/slave. How do they deal with it, and how should they deal with it?

We ask Joshua what the plans for are for Slim 3, and talk a bit about the differences between Slim and Silex. We also ask him about the history of PHP The Right Way: how it got started and how it has evolved over time with contributions and huge efforts from the PHP community.

Phil rants about illuminate/pagination having hard dependencies and tries to make excuses up for not sending a pull request, then comically days later caves and sends a pull request.

The whole gang discuss difficulties of managing pull requests, covering how to handle the expectations of the pull “requester” and the pull “requestee”, how to handle feedback and a few other bits and bobs.

This is a fairly chunky episode but these guests were long overdue, and they’re such nice guys we had to chat and answer as many questions as we could.

The video is less edited than the audio, so download and listen for a slightly shorter and more relevant version.

The Front Range PHP user-group joins the show as a live audience for the episode 26, in a new crazy bonus format which Phil thought might be fun. The idea of the episode is for people to generally pick our brain about PHP and code and tech and things. It kinda worked but the sound quality was terrible. Sorry about that folks.

They ask us a bunch of questions about how we got started in PHP.

The video provides great insight into what you lot look like when you’re sat at a user group shoving pizza into your face, which we thought might be different for our viewers. That might also be a lie, and we accidentally left it on the wrong camera, but hey… there is a MP3 version too.

Talking about feminism in tech is always difficult. This episode was quite a heated discussion with Kayla Daniels and Jessica D’Amico discussing their opinions about women-orientated groups such as PHPWomen and Girls Who Code.

Kayla wrote an excellent article titled Not a shiny unicorn, in which she made several points.

Essentially saying that specialist groups that try to help nurture female involvement can be seen - by some - to be a little patronising, like girls need special help, etc. Also whenever people freakout in the office because there is “a girl” there, things get weird. Suddenly swearing is completely frowned upon and people rush over to apologize to the nearest girl in earshot when it happens. These sorts of things have been noticed by Phil several times in his attending of conferences, workplace situations, etc, so it looked like an interesting topic to discuss.

Now, we could of just invited Kayla on to talk about it but an hour-long episode of people sitting around agreeing with each other does not really make for a representative conversation, or interesting listening. Friend of the show Jess joined us, and she had some different opinions about the situation.

Due to poor preparation on Phil’s side (he spent the two hours before the show cooking some epic dinner for his Dad after forgetting about the show) followed by some poor moderation Ben and Phil, the animated conversation was not the most productive that could have happened.

Since then, several productive things have happened. Kayla has released an amazing site called Code Manifesto which addresses some of the points made.

Furthermore, a site Phil forgot to mention entirely was Days Since Last Tech Incident, which is the answer to the question he asked: where can people find out more information about incidents so they can learn to keep an eye out for them, and attempt to help solve the problems or stop them happening again.

Ben and Phil both apologize for poor moderation leading to a tricky episode, and we apologize for how long it took us to get the episode up. A further apology for the lack of video, but we had to edit this one a bit and the video didn’t make it.

This week Ben Edmunds calls in from Portland and Phil Sturgeon calls in from THE FUTURE. They are joined by Steve Corona to discuss Scaling PHP.

Most of this conversation centers around Phil and Ben’s horrible facial hair with a few questions thrown Steve’s way to educate us on getting the most out of your LAMP stack. The main takeaways are to stop using Apache and to start using Postgres.

Go buy Steve’s book Scaling PHP if you want to be Web Scale.

This week Ben Edmunds and Phil Sturgeon are joined by Jacques Woodcock and Jordan Kasper to discuss virtPHP.

virtPHP is a tool for managing multiple environments on your development machine. It is similar to Python’s virtualenv or Ruby’s rbenv, but for PHP.

Phil will be speaking at PHP South Africa in April.

Ben has no idea what he will attend this year.

Jacques will likely be speaking at True North PHP later this year.

Jordan will be speaking at jQuery UK in May and at Dutch PHP in June.