Adam Culp has posted a three part series to his blog with some guidance about how to create "clean code" in your application development:

Whether we’re experienced developers or newcomers, we’ve all seen code that could/should have been done better. Many times it’s even code we ourselves wrote and revisited later for one reason or another. I, for one, have seen my share of code written by a “past me” and wondered what on earth I was thinking when I wrote that. Of course there has also been times when I was hired to fix another developers code, and it can be scary also.

There's three posts in the series:

• Part 1, Dirty Code (cause/effect)
• Part 2, Dirty Code (why we do it)
• Part 3, Dirty Code (how to spot/smell it)

The symfony blog has announced a new initiative for developers using their framework to get involved in - creating a website for a cause. The first step? Identifying the causes:

This event will take on the basic structure of other 48 hour web application development competitions, such as Rails Rumble, but with a special twist unique to symfony. The applications we create during the course of the competition will be gifted to different socially-minded organizations around the world. Once the fun is over, our work will live on and hopefully do a lot of good.

Since the first step involves identifying the causes the sites will be created for, they've laid out a few guidelines to help you submit the cause of your choice.

Feel like giving a bit back to something open source but aren't sure quite where to go? Well, the PHPWomen group is asking for donations to help further the women's group and its efforts:

As you know, we like to give out our free t-shirts at conferences to help spread the word about our group. [...] We also want to help out those who may be in need of training materials, help with the ZCE exam, or who want to speak at conferences, but may not afford to be able to do it.

They also have some other fund raising ideas in the works to help accomplish some of these goals too. You can also get involved and help out even if you don't have extra cash. Volunteer for the mentoring program or just offer a helping hand when they might need it.

Check out Elizabeth Naramore's blog post for more details.

Feel like giving a bit back to something open source but aren't sure quite where to go? Well, the PHPWomen group is asking for donations to help further the women's group and its efforts:

As you know, we like to give out our free t-shirts at conferences to help spread the word about our group. [...] We also want to help out those who may be in need of training materials, help with the ZCE exam, or who want to speak at conferences, but may not afford to be able to do it.

They also have some other fund raising ideas in the works to help accomplish some of these goals too. You can also get involved and help out even if you don't have extra cash. Volunteer for the mentoring program or just offer a helping hand when they might need it.

Check out Elizabeth Naramore's blog post for more details.