In this recent blog post to the PHPClasses.org website, Manual Lemos looks at how Microsoft is making a move to be more involved with the PHP community (as a result of some things discussed at this year's Microsoft Web Developer Summit and an interview with a member of the Microsoft OSS Labs staff).
Lately Microsoft has got closer to the PHP world. Not only they have been sponsoring several PHP events, but they also have contributed code in the form of a patch to ADODB PHP package, which is LGPL licensed, to make it work better with Microsoft SQL server, among other initiatives. [...] For the rest of the people that will not be able to attend to such events, I thought it would be interesting to do a small interview [...] so I contacted Microsoft OSS Labs people and Tom Hanrahan kindly offered to give this interview.
They talk about opinions on the Open Source initiatives Microsoft is making, the FastCGI module, IIS, the customer focus Microsoft is taking and the PHP 5.3 push.
In a new post to his blogEli White looks at something that can be a difficult task at times - interview programmers to find the right fit for your job. HE has one suggestion that could help a good developer stand out from the rest.
I've interviewed my fair share of programmers over the years, and I find personally that how you interview a 'junior' versus 'intermediate' versus a 'senior' programmer needs to change. Specifically in regards to one topic. What's that topic? It's giving a coding test (as well as just whether you ask coding questions in the interview)
He suggests that its especially good for weeding out those for a "junior developer" role showing where they put their emphasis. For a senior role, however, he suggests a test of a different sort - ranking their experience, their history and how much they've publicly done in the community (talks/articles/etc).
Cassandra Clark (from the Sun Developer's Network) has passed along a note that a podcast from one of the members of the PHP Women group has been posted - an interview with Lorna Mitchell.
A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of meeting Lorna Mitchell, at ZendCon in Santa Clara, California. We first met at the Sun booth (yes, Sun has products to support PHP). We struck up a brief conversation as I tried to get her to join the Sun Developer Network. I learned she belonged to PHPWomen.org which is a very influential group in the PHP community. [...] In this podcast, you'll learn more about Lorna herself and the PHPWomen.org. Please enjoy and stay tuned as I will try to have more members of this group in to talk with me.
You can grab the mp3 directly from the SDN Channel website.
The PHP Women site has posted an interview with one of their members from this year's ZendCon - Lise Driggers.
While at ZendCon I stole some time from the schedule of Lise Driggers, one of the female attendees I met there, to ask her a bit about herself and how she got to where she is today. Lise works for Timptech in Vancouver, migrating their existing i-series applications (also known as AS400 or "green screen") to flex, using PHP to communicate between PHP and the database.
They talk about how she got started with PHP, career paths, interaction with the PHP community and some other hobbies she has.
Check out the interviews category on the phpwomen.org website for more interviews with members and the founders of the group.
In the latest episode of The Show, the CakePHP podcast, Laura Thomson is interviewed about everything Mozilla.
Laura has been working at Mozilla for over a year now, and has been leveraging the CakePHP framework in many high-visibility Mozilla projects, such as the Firefox Add-Ons portal, and their new single sign-on initiative. Laura is a prolific speaker and writer, as well as an active member of the Open Source community. She has co-written the top selling PHP/MySQL book in the world, "PHP & MySQL Web Development" (Sams, 4th Edition). Mozilla has the largest known installation of the CakePHP in the world.
You can either subscribe to their feed and get this and other great CakePHP-related content or you can just grab the mp3 by itself and start listening.
If you were at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, you probably remember the Appcelerator team that was there promoting their product in the expo. Well, they also spent some time interviewing some of the attendees about PHP and their experiences with it. The Zend Developer Zone points out that they've now posted these to YouTube.
Appcelerator was a sponsor at ZendCon 08 this year but obviously they were much more as well. They created a series of videos from interviews they shot while there.
It's a series of four videos with titles like "Developers Hate PHP!", "Developers Love PHP!" and some "PHP Developer Gripes". Check them out and see if you can spot some of the notable names in the PHP community.
Recently CIO Magazine had a roundtable interview with representatives from each of the major language players on the web today - Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, Tcl and, of course, PHP.
Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.
Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.
Emran Hasan has a recommendation for those looking to hire on a "senior PHP developer" - beware.
With the rise of PHP developer as career, many are trying to get their share in the pie. Lately I've met a number of developers who have worked for more than one/two years in developing PHP applications in various companies and they consider themselves as "senior" developers.
Key things to keep an eye out for are the "more talk, less code" they tend to do and the lack of dedication to the tasks at hand. These bad developers then follow up with the typical blame to the junior developers, noting that it was them being difficult that caused all of the "real" problems.
At the recently passed Dutch PHP Conference 2008, the Bachelor-ict.nl website brought along their cameras and interviewed some of the attendees and speakers. Here's who they caught:
I recently caught up with Michael Kimsal, author of the newly-released
PHP Job Hunter's Handbook from
php|architect that can be ordered now in both PDF and print versions. I wanted
to get inside his head and find out all about the reasons behind the book, his
experience in writing it and any tips he had to share, so I had him answer a few questions.
Read on for the interview...
