On the 7PHP.com site today there's a new community interview posted - this time with Corey Ballou, the co-organizer of the Queen City PHP user group (and upcoming Nomad PHP speaker). They talk some about his background, how he got involved in the community and some of his thoughts on PHP on general.

In this edition I talked with Corey Ballou who is the co-organizer of the Queen City PHP meetup group. @cballou has also been working as a developer with the cool mojoLive team. To be noted that Corey will be the speaker for the next, 3rd NomadPHP Online Talk this week and he will be presenting “Creating Realtime Applications with PHP and Websockets“. I now invite you to learn from his experience and get to know his personality.

They talk about Corey's early start with computers and how he evolved from things like VBScript and Perl up to PHP and other web technologies. He touches on some of the good and bad he sees about the language and some of his top advice to beginners. He also recommends some other resources and books to check out to gain even more knowledge. He finishes off the interview with a suggestion to all of those "on the sidelines" out there - get involved, speak and become a real proponent of the language!

On the 7php.com site today there's a new interview in their PHP community series, a talk with Stuart Herbert of the Phix project:

In this edition I talked with Stuart Herbert (@stuherbert), a highly highly and highly experienced software engineer. His interview is packed with insights and experienced thoughts. Herbert is one of those rare experienced geek who also teaches the principles of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Stuart has been involved in almost everything out there in the Programming sphere; he’s a conference speaker, author of books, author for magazine articles, does pod-casts, volunteer developer for Gentoo Linux, contributor and lead to open-source PHP software like PHIX, has been a founder of the University of Sheffield’s Computer and Software Society growing it to over 1,800 members, and so much more as you will read below.

Questions include how he got started with PHP, his opinion of the language now versus when he started, advice to budding PHP developers and what tools he likes and uses. They also talk about his thoughts on conferences, ORMs, traits and the balance between good engineering and good management.