Think of a developer as an athlete. He or she is aiming for a medal in a competition. A figure skater can't just perform a triple axel in the Olympics after seeing it done on television. This requires a lot of practice, so that when the time comes, the performance is flawless. Of course, programming doesn't have to be flawless. One must remain pragmatic, yet it still requires practice before a concept can be safely implemented without breaking the project or missing deadlines. Who will pay for that practice?

She relates the development manager to the coach of a sports team, being the one that guides the developers into being all they can be and trying out new ideas in the process. She also recommends making use of idle time between projects to prototype, do R&D and learn in general.

Developers need a sandbox. If you don't give it to them, you can end up with one of the following issues. Your entire project could become a sandbox, making it unstable. [...] If you want your developers to get better, allow time for practice, not just learning. It's necessary, easy to do when planned and provides countless benefits to your company. Let me know how that advice worked out for you.

Recently we overheard SunshinePHP being grouped together with commercial "for profit" events and conferences, which prompted us to write this blog post to clear things up. The SunshinePHP Developer Conference is NOT a profit driven event, and is actually a community led event by developers, for developers. Early on we tried to make this more public, but it appears the message was lost with everything the conference contains. (we've made it too good)

They note that any profits made from the event will be going back into future events (as put on by the user group) and the PHP community. This kind of thing is similar to some of the other PHP user group-organized conference that have popped up over the last year - good to see the trend continue.

If you're interested in the conference itself, you can find out more on the main event site or just go ahead and register for the event. You can still pick up your tickets until February 1st for about $220 USD (General admission) or $160 USD (Student).

These fallacies directly relate to us as PHP developers since we build distributed applications each and every day. We build mashups, applications that interact with SOAP and REST services, authenticate users via Facebook, Google, or Twitter APIs, retrieve information from remote databases and caching services, etc. Make no mistake, we're building distributed computer applications. Given that we are building distributed applications, it's important that we understand the eight fallacies and how they affect us.

Among the list of their fallacies are things like:

• The Network is Reliable
• Bandwidth is Infinite
• The Network is Secure
• There is One Administrator

Check out the full article for the rest of them and summaries of each.

Welcome back to the fourth part of the "PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers" series, in which we'll cover how PHP arrays are internally represented and used throughout the code base.

He starts with an obvious foundation: "everything's a hash table" (even properties, classes and yes, arrays). He describes what a hash table is and talks about two of the most commonly used versions of it in the PHP source - HashTable and Bucket. He gets into their usage a bit and compares this to the corresponding PHP code that uses a standard array.

In the previous part ircmaxell explained where you can find the PHP source code and how it is basically structured and also gave a small introduction to C (as that's the language PHP is written in). If you missed that post, you probably should read it before starting with this one. What we'll cover in this article is locating the definitions of internal functions in the PHP codebase, as well as understanding them.

He starts with a basic example - a string function, strpos. He shows a handy searching trick to help find the actual function definition and which matches should be given priority. He lays out a typical skeleton of a PHP function definition and gets into some detail as to what this particular function does (in C). He briefly mentions the Zend Engine functions and a look ahead to finding classes and methods.

A presentation entitled "DevOps for Developers" was given at the WebTech 2011 conference and now the slides are up online for all to see. I'll summarize the show and let you know where the better slides are so you don't have to flip through the whole thing. It starts out on an introductory level, but then it gets into some tools and techniques that are talked about less often.

Technologies mentioned in the presentation include more familiar development tools like PHP, Apache, HipApache, Gearman, NoSQL and Memcached. There's also some examples of more "devops" things like Vagrant, Puppet and WetWare.

PHP 5.4 beta 1 was released but APC is not going to be included at least in PHP 5.4.0. Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss this and other happenings in the PHP world, like the adoption of more robust Continuous Integration methods to prevent shipping buggy PHP versions like what happened with PHP 5.3.7.

The podcast also features an interview with Bob Ray, an author and contributor to the MODX CMS platform project. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading it directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting this and past shows automatically.