On the Laravel News site, they've posted the announcement of the release of the results from their 2018 edition of the Laravel Survey.

We partner with LaraJobs to run an annual Laravel survey to see what types of projects people are taking on with Laravel as well as get some feedback on what the Laravel community could be doing better. The results ended up with over 1,500 submissions, and some interesting insights.

You can see the complete results on this 2018 Laravel Survey Results page and thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.

Questions asked in this year's survey included topics such as why they selected Laravel, size of projects, if they're able to find the developers they need and what they'd like to see more of in the Larvel community (tutorials, articles, regional conferences, etc).

On the Symfony blog there's a new post for those that have been putting off getting their tickets to SymfonyLive London and, more specifically, the pre-conference workshops. Time is limited and the training sessions are almost sold out!

All Symfony conferences come with pre-conference workshops. We organized them to enable the conference attendees to get trained on Symfony and its ecosystem just before the conference, during special workshops sessions at a very special price. The idea is to get the most out of the conference and enhance your Symfony skills before learning new tips and tricks from the speakers’ experience during the conference. We organize 4 different pre-conference workshops at SymfonyLive London 2018 on September 27th and they are almost all sold out!

They also share a listing of the pre-conference workshops happening at this year's event:

• "Symfony 4 Best Practices" by Nicolas Grekas from Symfony
• "Building API-driven apps with API Platform" by Kévin Dunglas from Les-Tilleuls.coop
• "Symfony Messenger" by Samuel Rozé, creator of the component
• "Lightning Fast Tests" by Jakub Zalas, Symfony core team member

Each workshop title in the post is a link to more information about the workshop and how to pick up your tickets. For more information about the conference, ticket pricing and to order yours, check out the main conference site.

On the Symfony project blog they've posted an announcement about the opening of the SymfonyLive Berlin 2018 Call for Papers.

Berlin will see its next SymfonyLive from October 24th to 26th! This year, we are moving to a new, but familiar, venue: the Mercure MOA, where the international SymfonyCon 2016 took place.

As usual for the Berlin edition, we will have two days of workshops, and a single day conference with two tracks full of talks about Symfony and related technologies.

The call for papers is open and will end July 31st. They're looking for a wide range of topics including developer workflows, modern Javascript and, of course, Symfony features. The post also talks about what kind of speakers they're looking for and about the workshop schedule.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post announcing the speakers for SymfonyLive London 2018 happening in late September.

We’re very pleased to announce that the conference schedule for this year’s edition of the SymfonyLive conference in London is online. Join us on September 28th for an intense conference day dedicated to Symfony, divided into 2 tracks.

Discover now all the speakers selected and the talks they will present there! We’re very excited to welcome 14 speakers at the conference.

Speakers at this year's event include:

• Michael Cullum
• Nicolas Grekas
• Neal Brooks
• Samuel Roze

Fabien Potencier, founder and project lead for Symfony, will also be there to give the opening keynote for the conference. You can find out more about the conference on the main site and pick up your tickets for either just the training days, just the session days or for a package of both.

The Delicious Brains site has posted an update for the last part (10 of 10) of their series providing a guide to hosting WordPress yourself for some smaller changes for doing it in 2018.

I originally started writing Hosting WordPress Yourself back in February 2015, which makes this series over three years old! During that time a lot has changed, which is why I updated the series just over 12 months ago, to keep the content relevant. Since then, even more has changed in the WordPress hosting scene, so it’s time for another update!

I have already updated the existing articles in this series with the changes that follow. This article serves as a changelog and documents what has changed in each part of this series, where I guide you through the process of building a complete server to house your WordPress sites

This update shares changes in the virtual server setup, new software releases, suggestions of server monitoring services and web server configuration changes. Each point in the list is also linked back to the other part of the series related to the changes to give more context.

On the Laravel News site, they have a post sharing a video from a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) looking forward at PHP in 2018.

PHP in 2018 is a talk by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, which focuses on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3. We have some exciting low-level performance wins coming to PHP 7.3, which should be out late 2018. It’s highly encouraging that PHP’s focus is mainly on performance in the PHP 7.x releases.

For many in the PHP community, 2016 and 2017 was all about getting onto PHP 7. The drastic performance improvements and overall efficiency have resulted in PHP 7 adoption rates well beyond past PHP versions. If you are not on PHP 7 yet, you will learn why you should be, but the talk will focus more on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3 along with optimization and static analysis.

In the post, they give a brief summary of the talk and one of their favorite parts ("crappy code runs really really well"). The video of the talk is embedded in the page but you can also watch it on YouTube directly. The slides are here.

Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the Composer project, has posted another of his PHP version statistics posts, this time for the first part of 2018.

It's stats o'clock! See 2014, 2015, 2016.1, 2016.2, 2017.2 for previous similar posts.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the <a href="https://packagist.org/>packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

The remainder of the post shares some of the results and differences since November 2017. Among the highlights are:

• The use of PHP 7.2 has increased by a large percent
• The use of all over versions (including PHP 7.1) is dropping
• There is still a large number of packages that only require a version in the PHP 5.x range to be installed

Check out the full post for the complete stats on versions in use and trends (along with some nice graphs of the results).

The Exakat blog has an interesting post to their site sharing some statistics from the applications they've scanned related to commonly used coding styles. In this PHP Index of Coding (for 2018) they share a listing of practices in the order of popularity according to the results of over 1700 projects.

Not using @ is the poster child of good practices. It’s also looked upon, as an impossible goal. Did you know that the @ operator is only merely used by 50% of PHP applications ? Same for parenthesis with include (and co) : don’t use them, like 50% of the developpers. This is how the Exakat PHP Index of coding was born.

Every month, Exakat runs thousands of analysis on half a billion lines of PHP code. This is primarily for testing purpose, a kind of torture test that checks the engine runs on any kind of code. And it is very useful to ensure all situations are correctly handled.

We also extracted the following stats out of 1700+ projects, analysis by analysis. This way, any issue may be ranked from ‘wide spread’ to ‘very unusual’. In fact, ‘wide spread’ may also be understood as : ‘almost a feature’.

The results are ranked by frequency of appearance with the top five being:

• Uses Default Values
• Used Once Variables (In Scope)
• Unused Methods
• Method Could Be Private Method
• Should Use Local Class

For each item in the list there's a link to more information about the check and how much it has changed since the last time the index was generated.

On his Medium.com site, Adnan Ahmed has shared some of his thoughts about being a modern backend developer in 2018. In it he talks about the current state of backend development and makes some recommendations for those wanting to get started.

Web development today is completely different from what it was a few years ago; there are lots of different things that can easily baffle anyone entering into the web development. It was one of the reasons that we decided to make these step by step visual guides demonstrating the bigger picture and to give anyone a clear idea about what they have to follow to be in certain roles in web development.

The post starts with a large infographic showing the basic steps and some of the related technologies and concepts to go with them. Following this they break it down into more detail in a text form with summaries attached for each. There are a lot of topics in the list (24 of them) but here's some of the highlights:

• Learn a Language
• Learn a Package Manager
• Standards and Best Practices
• Security
• ?Learn about the Relational [and NoSQL] Databases
• Learning a Framework
• Caching
• RESTful APIs
• Different Auth Methods
• GraphQL [and Graph Databases]

His final recommendation is one that's good for beginners and veterans in the software development world alike: "keep exploring". If you stop learning and stop trying new things you'll stagnate in your own work and career. Challenge yourself to learn something new - a new language, tool or technique - as often as possible and apply it to your work.

On his "Tech Notes" blog Nathan Dench has put together a listing of some of the interesting things that happened in the first part of 2018 in the PHP community.

I organise the a post from Marcel Pociot about the GitHub statistics for various PHP projects

news around Symfony, Silex and Laravel

There's also a few other "random things" to finish off the post with links to other interesting articles, projects and tools.