php[architect] magazine has posted an announcement about the release of their December 2018 issue - Better Practice - Improve Your Skills.

Practice and more practice are the keys to adopting modern software engineering practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re using WordPress or Drupal to manage website content, trying to learn unit testing, get hired, or looking for better ways to manage date and time data—there’s always an opportunity to learn how to do it better. This issue rounds up articles on each of these topics to help you deepen your problem-solving skills.

Articles in this issue include:

• "Custom Post Types in WordPress" by Andrea Roenning
• "The Flexibility of Drupal 8" by Michael Miles
• "How to Learn PHP Unit Testing With Katas" by David Hayes
• "It’s About Time" by Colin DeCarlo

All of the usual columns have returned as well with thoughts about creating a culture in your development organization, hashing, interview coding challenges and more. Check out the full list of articles and columns for this month's edition on the php[architect] site and pick up a copy of your own! If you want to "try before you buy" you can read this month's free article and get a feel for the content.

In a post to his site just before the new year Patrick Louys shared some of his thoughts about how to become a better developer in 2018 as a sort of programming-related New Year's resolution.

Do you have any programming related New Year’s resolutions? A lot of people don’t follow through with their resolutions. But don’t let that discourage you. When you make resolutions, you are much more likely to achieve your goals (10x more).

I wrote this post to show you how you can achieve your programming New Year’s resolutions. Every year I have been writing down my goals, for over a decade. It helped me grow a lot in my personal and professional life. It’s not just about setting goals and achieving them. You have to pick the right goals.

He begins by making a few recommendations when it comes to setting goals and how to set yourself up in your day to day work to achieve them. He then relates this back to programming goals, suggestion you focus more on patterns and practices rather than specific technologies (unless they're relevant to your work). He also recommends several books to read during 2018 to either learn new concepts if you're just starting out or wanting to refine your own skills.

On the Toptal.com site they've posted a guide that aims to help you write good code that stands the test of time. They provide six "commandments" that they think can help make your code better and easier to maintain in the future.

Specifically, “good code” is code that is easily and readily maintainable by an organization (not just by its author!) and will live for longer than just the sprint it was written in. The following are some things I’ve discovered in my career as an engineer at big companies and small, in the USA and abroad, that seem to correlate with maintainable, “good” software.

Their list includes suggestions like:

• Treat Your Code the Way You Want Other’s Code to Treat You
• Good Code Doesn’t Reinvent the Wheel, it Stands on the Shoulders of Giants
• Don’t Cross the Streams!
• When Possible, Let the Computer Do the Work

Each item on the list comes with a brief description with a bit more detail and how to apply it to your development. It's not focused on any one language, however, so there's no code samples here - just links to other resources and tools that can help in their application.

On the FreeCodeCamp Medium blog Bill Sourer shares some tips you can use to find time to become a better developer in the fast-based, sometimes crazy world of software development.

There’s no time for anything. At least that’s how it feels doesn’t it? No time to learn all the things you think you need to learn to stay ahead of the curve. No time to go back and refactor that ugly piece of code. It works (sort of) and there’s a deadline approaching. No time to write unit tests for everything. No time to write documentation or comments for the next guy who gets stuck maintaining what you wrote. No time to think. No time to breathe. No time!

Well… if you take the time to read this article, I promise you’ll find yourself with more time for what’s important.

He breaks it down into five main tips (here's a tl;dr for those in a rush):

• You don’t need to learn every new thing in order to stay relevant.
• Writing good code takes less time than writing bad code, BUT it doesn’t feel that way.
• Working 24/7 does NOT make you a hero. Managing expectations does.
• Not all time spent “improving” code has the same ROI.
• Scheduled down time makes you more productive.

Each item on the list has a paragraph or three explaining it in a bit more detail. There's also some other interesting ideas and thoughts in the comments of the post from other readers.

The Sound of Symfony podcast, with hosts Magnus Nordlander and Tobias Nyholm, has posted their latest episode: Episode #12 - [Building a stronger community](Episode 12 - Building a stronger community).

This time we're talking about the Symfony Community, how we can make it better, and what we can learn from other communities.

Other topics mentioned in this episode include:

• the PHP Mentoring project
• the StackOverflow PHP chat
• PHP-FIG
• Packagist
• HWIOauthBundle

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the show directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get the latest shows as they're released.

Christoph Rumpel has posted a list of ten things he thinks will help you be a better programmer overall.

It is easy to become a web developer these days. The only things you need is a computer and Internet. But I believe there is big difference between a developer and a good one. Good developers are like little heroes. They are awesome in what they do and are there when you need them. A real benefit to the our world and definitely someone you can look up to! I believe everyone can make this step and start being a better developer today. This is why I asked great developers from all around the world what they think makes someone a really good developer.

His list covers more than just good coding practices too. He suggests things like:

• Experimentation
• Reading the code of other good developers
• Just build websites
• Contribute to other projects
• Watch out for the Hypetrain
• Never give up

He includes a quick summary of each of these and the rest of the top ten list too. Be sure to check out the full post for more.

In his latest post Jani Hartikainen makes a recommendation for those wanting to become better developers: first become a teacher. He suggests that communication is the second most important skill a developer can have.

What is the most important skill for a developer besides actually writing code? Communication. What do you typically do when you communicate as a developer with someone else? You explain problems, you describe solutions, you talk to non-programmers about what you’re doing. You could also say that you’re teaching others about what you’re doing. [...] Being a good communicator is often completely overlooked.

He looks at why it's important for a developer to have good communication skills and what it means to "communicate well" with fellow developers. He suggests that real teaching can start when developers understand the domain and code they're working with. He also talks about the flip side of things, the importance of listening to other developers and those trying to help. Listening well means understanding the question and being open to different ideas, even if they contradict your own.

As with all aspects of programming, the best way to improve communication and your ability to reason about code on a higher level is practice.

[php]architect has officially released their latest issue - the January edition with articles focusing on how to be a better developer (and a few other things).

The first issue of 2014 is now available. Our January issue aims to give you some tips and tricks to make your development life easier.

Articles in this edition include:

• Straight-forward ways improve your developer skills
• Thoughts on commenting code from two great developers
• Get the CLI working for you with console apps and ZF2
• Learn which common OOP misconceptions you may be following
• Harness the power of regex

You can pick up your own copy (print or digital) directly from the php[architect] site.

On PHPClasses.org today they've posted the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series - Episode #35, "Better Documentation for PHP internals".

With the inclusion of Zend Optimizer+ extension in PHP 5.5, the need for better documentation of PHP internals became more evident, so PHP contributors can write extensions that take the most of the core PHP features. That is one of the topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 35 of the Lately In PHP podcast. They also talked about having more optimized PHP opcodes, some interesting PHP feature proposals that got rejected, as well the article about the top version control systems used by PHP developers.

You can listen to this episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by watching the video of the recorded Google Hangout session.

Anthony Ferrara has posted his latest episode of his "Programming with Anthony" video series, this time he talks about becoming a better developer (hint: it's not about knowing everything).

In today's episode, I talk a little bit about what it takes to become a better developer. Nobody will ever expect you to know everything, but you better know how to find it...

You can watch the video either in his post or over on YouTube. He also has this and his other videos set up in a playlist if you'd like to see coverage of other topics like design patterns, iterators, dependency injection and prepared statements.