On the Source blog there's a great post that reinforces something that all developers should keep in mind when developing their applications: good code runs on good communication. "Tech language" barriers can make this difficult, but this post gives you a few suggestions on places to start improving.

When I started the interactive team at the Sun Sentinel in 2013, I thought the biggest challenge would be the code. I was wrong. [...] It wasn’t always easy. When you need someone on your side, but they don’t speak the same tech language, it can be very difficult. Investing (not necessarily financially, but emotionally and mentally) in creating a space where teams can work better together is key. Here are some strategies for overcoming the language barrier to make collaboration smoother.

They recommend things like:

• having face-to-face conversations to work out the best solutions
• avoiding assumptions about skill levels
• pausing to check and ensure everyone understands the current state of conversation
• agreeing on common terms and naming

Finally, they make a recommendation that could make some of the developers out their cringe a bit: "document the madness". As they point out, having good documentation of not only the result of the work but also the process along the way can be crucial for future work and others not directly involved in the process to review.

The Laravel.io podcast has made an announcement that today (Wednesday, Oct 5th) they will be doing a live stream of episode #19 at 2pm EST.

Tomorrow at 2:00 PM EST the latest Laravel.io Podcast will be aired live on Google Hangouts. Currently no topics are listed but you will be able to ask questions live on the air.

If you'd like to join in, head over to this page around 2pm and join in on the conversation. If you're interested in other back episodes of the show and want to listen, check out the podcast page and subscribe to their feed.

On Reddit.com there's a discussion that's started up around when to throw exceptions in your PHP applications. The poster asks:

When and where do you throw exceptions? Is it just on database connections? Is it whenever you run a query? Send an email? I'm just curious what the best situations are to throw exceptions and possibly improve my code.

There's a good number of replies so far, some a bit more vague than others:

• "In exceptional circumstances."
• "You throw an except when you can't sensibly handle what has just happened."
• "Fatals for compile-time errors, Exceptions for run-time errors"
• "I throw an exception any time the function being called is either not capable of continuing or it is not going to return the expected results."
• "Exceptions everywhere is not a good thing."

Check out more suggestions and comments in the full post.

On the Engine Yard blog today they've posted a conversation about testing between Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes (also the hosts of the DevHell podcast).

Our friends Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes recently had a chat about testing in PHP. Read on to get the low down on different testing tools and their relative merits–check it out as Ed and Chris weep for the future, come to some interesting conclusions and get their hands dirty so you don’t have to.

They talk some about the current tools for unit testing in PHP applications and show what a sample test looks like. Ed talks about how the current testing tools can make it intimidating for people to get started testing and mentions the built-in testing library in Python that is a bit easier. There's also some mention of acceptance/functional testing and the Behat + Mink combo.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans looks back some more at his experiences at this year's OSCON and mentions his personal favorite session attended while there - the PHP Lightning talks.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans looks back some more at his experiences at this year's OSCON and mentions his personal favorite session attended while there - the PHP Lightning talks.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.