The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode featuring returning special guest Joe Watkins to talk about contributing back to the PHP language:

In this weeks episode we chat to good friend of the show Joe Watkins. We start off discussion with his recent work on creating a compute-node, dual WAN setup and accepted PHP Serbia talk on contributing to PHP without being a ‘C wizard’. From here we move on to mention some of the areas (bug tracking system and QA) that could be improved with the help of new contributors within the PHP internals ecosystem. Finally, we highlight several recently proposed RFCs, his opinions on them and some work he is doing on a future RFC.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to also subscribe to their feed and follow the podcast on Twitter to get updates with new shows are released.

On the Laravel News site there's a post sharing some of the results from a recent request for feedback from Taylor Otwell (creator of the Laravel framework) asking the Reddit community for their own experiences contributing to the Laravel project.

Taylor created a feedback thread on Reddit asking the community on why they do not contribute as well as asking for suggestions on how to manage issues.

Taylor said in the thread, “One thing that has been bothering me is I have seen a few people say they don’t contribute to Laravel because it seems like PRs get closed or shot down without much explanation. [...] Taylor continues, “My biggest challenge is the “Issues” tab on GitHub. It gets a lot of activity and its hard to filter out genuine issues from support requests, configuration problems, general questions, etc”.

Among the opinions shared in the responses were comments about how feedback was given by a certain member of the Laravel development team. Taylor has already said that processes have been put in motion to help make this situation better and move people to where they're most productive. The thread and shares a lot of other opinions besides just this, so if you're considering contributing it's worth a read.

The latest episode of the /Dev/Hell Podcast has been released - Episode 19: Pull Requests Welcome:

This week on /dev/hell is “let’s talk about arguments Chris got into on Twitter” week. Most of the discussion revolves around how we interact with users, both developer-types and average joes.

You can listen to this latest episode either via their in-page player, by grabbing the mp3 directly or by subscribing to their RSS feed.