The Paragon Initiative has a recent post to their blog that's kicking off a new series of posts called "Slice of PIE". In these posts they hope to provide answers in a Q&A style, answering questions commonly asked of them via Twitter or other means.

Astute readers have noticed that our blog posts have decreased in frequency this year. We put a heavy emphasis on quality, not so much on quantity.

At the same time, we field a lot of questions on social media, where our answers (and, sometimes, the questions themselves) are difficult to locate, especially when people close or lock their accounts.

With both of these thoughts in mind, I asked my Twitter followers if they'd be interested in a Q&A-style blog series. I expected maybe a 55:45 split on yes/no responses, but the final tally was overwhelmingly "Yes".

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce the pilot for our new series, Slice of PIE.

In this inaugural edition they start by sharing how readers can get their questions answered and what kinds of questions will be answered. To kick things off they answer a question about the use of asymmetric encryption and comparing it to hybrid encryption.

Christoph Rumpel, lead developer on the BotMan project has a new post to his site walking you through the process and code he used to create a LaravelQuiz chatbot using a combination of the library and Laravel.

Ever wondered how well you know your favorite PHP framework Laravel? Give the LaravelQuiz Chatbot a try, and you will find out. This article is a step by step guide on how I created this chatbot with BotMan and Laravel.

He starts off by introducing the project and what some of the basic features are. Next comes some of the setup, including the botman command line tool and the creation of the BotMan-based project. As the tool uses a connection to Telegram, he also installs the client library for that and sets up the related credentials. Next comes the storage of the questions and answers (migrations and models) and the creation of the QuizConversation class to handle the interactions. There's also code examples for showing the current quiz status, making a "high score" list, and a few other extras. All code and command line calls you need are included in the post.

On the Zend blog they've posted an article where Zend's own Cal Evans shares the answers to some of the questions he received from a "unit testing for product managers" webinar.

Thanks to everyone that joined our Unit testing for project managers webinar yesterday. It was great to see so many people engaged and asking questions. I’ve pulled together answers for your questions we didn’t get to on the webcast. If you have more questions, leave a comment below!

If you missed the webinar or want to re-watch it, the on-demand version is now available. The slides are also posted on Slideshare.

The questions he answers touch on topics that include:

• property-based testing
• testing on an existing project (medium or large)
• integration vs unit testing

The final answer covers something shared at the end of the presentation, the resolution to "just do it". Cal backs that statement up with some additional detail and puts it in the mindset of a project manager.

The Laravel News site has posted a video from a recent Laravel Sydney meeting featuring Jeffrey Way, owner and operator of the popular Laracasts screencast tutorial service.

The Laravel Sydney user group had a special guest in their latest meeting. At 5:30am, his time, Jeffrey Way complete with blood-shot eyes and a massive coffee jar did a live question and answer interview with the group led by Ben Corlett.

You can watch the video either through the in-page player or by heading over to YouTube to watch it there directly.

In his latest post Derick Rethans shares his answer to a question he was asked at a recent PHP conference regarding the escaping of input before use in a MongoDB query.

At last weekend's PHP Benelux I gave a tutorial titled "From SQL to NoSQL". Large parts of the tutorial covered using MongoDB—how to use it from PHP, schema design, etc. I ran a little short of time, and since then I've been getting some questions. One of them being: "Should I escape my input, and if so, how?". Instead of trying to cram my answer in 140 characters on Twitter, I thought it'd be wise to reply with this blog post. The short answer is: yes, you do need to escape.

He uses the rest of the post to get into the longer answer, a bit more detail about why you should escape and what kinds of things can be done. He points out that, because of how MongoDB queries are created, SQL injection is much more difficult. He does remind you that superglobals can also be used to send arrays too which could lead to unexpected data input. He gives an example of how this would work and why it would be a problem.

So although MongoDB's query language does not require you to build strings, and hence "escape" input, it is required that you either make sure that the data is of the correct data type.

Mathias Noback has continued his series looking at the use of command busses in PHP applications. In this third part of his series, he answers some questions that have been asked by his own readers.

So far we've had three posts in this series about commands, events and their corresponding buses and handlers: a wave of command buses, responsibilities of the command bus, from commands to events. Now I'd like to take the time to answer some of the very interesting questions that by readers.

He answers questions about:

• The difference between commands and events
• Disadvantages of using a command bus
• The command as constructor argument
• How to return a value from the command bus
• Could commands handle themselves?

Each question comes with a portion of the question from the original author, an explanation and some code where needed to illustrate his point.

Phil Sturgeon has reposted an answer he gave in response to this Quroa entry about why people "think PHP sucks".

There are a lot of reasons people "hate" PHP, or at least look down on it. Some of them are founded, some are not, and some of them are circumstantial.

He mentions seven of the reasons people commonly give for not liking PHP:

• "Inconsistent haystack / needle"
• PHP is a HTML file, with logic
• No standards
• Lack of Quality Packages
• Misconception (about the current PHP features)
• You were doing it wrong
• Elitism ("not using PHP is cool")

There's even more discussion happening on the subject in this reddit post with thoughts from both PHP and non-PHP developers.

If you've been looking for a good way to get introduced to the latest version of the Zend Framework but didn't know where to start, you might grab a spot in this upcoming webinar from Zend about the Zend Framework 1.10.

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it's built, and answer your questions about the new release.

The webinar will be happening this coming Wednesday, March 17th, at 9am PST and will be happening via WebEx. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler will be talk about the new features, current functionality that was enhanced and will answer your burning questions. To reserve your spot, head over to the registration page and enter your info.

Following some of his recent experience in finding a new source of employment, Brandon Savage has shared some of the common questions he was given during his search for a PHP development position.

There are a large number of PHPers looking for jobs right now. After having just gone through the process myself, I wanted to put together some of the most common PHP interview questions. These questions are all non-technical, but do represent the soft side of PHP interviewing. I cannot help you if you don’t have the technical skills to answer the technical questions, but answering these questions correctly is often the key to making or breaking your chances with an interviewer who otherwise has fine technical candidates.

Questions he was asked included "How did you get into PHP?", "Where do you ultimately want to be in life?" and the more random "How many gas stations are there in Los Angeles?". For each, Brandon recommends a few tips on dealing with them and includes some possible tactics on answering.

As a continuation from his previous post ("How do GOOD developers ask questions?") Mike Bernat is back with this suggestion on how should good developers answer questions.

When given a very specific question that you know has a very specific answer, your first reaction might be to blurt out the answer and be done with it. However, I like to go the extra step and ask what they've tried so far or what research they've done. I like to show them how to arrive at the answer on their own as well as provide the solution.

He suggests that it's more about the thinking behind the answer than just reciting something from memory. Anyone can memorize facts and terms (and solutions, for that matter) but a good developer will be able to explain why he came to that conclusion.