On the Laravel News site there's a recent post by Sharon Steed talking about building a culture of trust and why sharing is good on both a personal and corporate level for your career (and not just in technology).

I speak about empathy on teams and why vulnerability is a great asset in your professional life. Sharing ideas falls right in line with my own ideology, but I also understand why people are so terrified to offer up opinions.

[...] I’m constantly amazed at how many people refuse to talk about projects they are working on for fear of others trying to swipe the idea. I’m even more so surprised at people who go out of their way to not share ideas with bosses or coworkers. Yes, there is absolutely a chance that someone else will take credit for that idea. The nature of working with other people, however, is that of collaboration.

She goes on to give some example situations, how sharing and trust between people plays and role and how many are realizing the value of being open. She gives examples of companies that are following this same idea on a corporate level like Buffer, Zappos and Landmark (an oil and gas software company). She ends the post with some practical advice on how you can help foster this culture of trust in your own company and career.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, with host and PHP community member Sammy K Powers, has released their latest episode today - Episode #28: The Alcoholic & Unfit PHP Culture

The PHP community has its fair-share of devs struggling with alcohol & weight loss and it doesn't help that there is a strong culture around alcohol consumption at nerd events. For some, the bottle is just a fun weekend with nerds. For others, it's a vice & deep struggle affecting them both mentally and physically.

We'll be discussing the alcoholic culture in the PHP community as well as our struggle with weight loss.

This episode features a long list of guests too: Samantha Quiñones, Matt Frost, Dustin Uresk, Scott Arciszewski, Michelle Sanver, Daniel Noel-Davies, Jenny Wong and Jeremy Mikola. You can catch this latest episode either through the in-page video player or directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode be sure to follow their RSS feed and follow them on Twitter.

Cal Evans has a new post to his site with a great suggestion for those looking to hire PHP developers: get your jobs page right and show that you have a good "developer culture" to attract good, solid talent.

When building an online strategy for finding developers to hire, start with your web site. It is amazing that so many companies miss this totally or mess this step up. Make sure you have a top level menu item that is easy to identify as “this is where we post jobs”. Call it “Jobs”, “Careers”, “Work with us” whatever, just make sure it’s in the top level of your menu and not something that people have to dig down into your site to get to.

He also suggests that you treat the "Jobs" page as an important part of the site. Vague or incomplete descriptions of the positions turn off developers and will make them move on to something else. Link to the deeper details and don't overwhelm the viewer with it all up front. He gives two examples of companies that he thinks have gotten it right and how it reflects on their investment in developer culture.

So step 0 in the process of finding developers to work on your team is to build a culture of respect. If you get this right, attracting developers – attracting the best developers – will be easy. Get this wrong though, nothing else will matter. Remember, developer talk to each other within their community. They will know if you are not a good place to work.

The Loosely Coupled podcast has released episode #7 of their show: Building a Testing Culture. In this latest episode hosts Matt Frost and Jeff Carouth talk about their own experience with unit testing and make some recommendations on how to make it a priority in your group.

In this is episode Matt and Jeff discuss how to build a testing culture in your company. They discuss organization resistance, the importance of testing and how to move forward when the rest of your company is less than excited.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed if you like the show and want more.

Troy Hunt has posted ten reminders for "uncultured web developers" out there to think about when they're developing applications for a world-wide audience.

What a lot of this boils down to is culture, or more specifically, lack of cultural awareness. I’m talking about making assumptions based on what a developer may personally hold to be true but in the broader global context is incorrect and often marginalises their audience. In the pursuit of a more globally harmonious online experience, let’s take a look at 10 lessons relating to aspects of web development with a cultural bent. Some of this may not be new to you, but all of it is relevant if you want to play nice with people from all cultural walks of life.

Among the list of his ten tips you'll find things like:

• Firefox and Chrome command 91% of the market
• Almost always, 8/7 comes before 7/8
• Country code top level domains give context
• Time zones matter (and they’re not universally understood)
• Don’t deprioritise your international audiences

Check out the rest of the list in his full post.

Sebastian Bergmann has pointed out something obvious to anyone that's ever tried to work with unit tests in PHP - there's just not that much support for it. The software is there and waiting to be used, but too many developers just don't take advantage of it.

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

From the Professionl PHP Blog today, there's a followup post to his Why isn't PHP the natural successor to Java? post previously - a look at some of the items mentioned in the Zend Framework, branching into a discussion of PHP's object capabilities.

Joshua Eichorn (among others) notices that active record can't work as shown in the Zend Framework webcast. The syntax presented during the web cast is not possible in PHP because of inherited static methods are treated. Mike Naberezny notes the problem and suggests that it will end up getting fixed in PHP, the sitepoint thread Trouble in Zend Framework Land?, 33degrees smells vaporware, and Elizabeth Marie Smith does too.

I look at this incident as an incredibly good omen. My optimism about Zend's PHP framework is not for the framework itself, but for what it means for OO support in PHP. In my book, the more developers that have commit access to both ZPF and to PHP, the better PHP 6 will be for me. I look at ZPF as an important step in building a culture of objects in the PHP community.

He continues, talking more about how object-oriented languages are still popping up right and left, and how PHP, at its core, needs an OO layer built on top to compare. He's not looking to belittle the OOP support in PHP, just to note that there's more work to be done - and the Zend Framework might be what pushed the development of that along...

From the Professionl PHP Blog today, there's a followup post to his Why isn't PHP the natural successor to Java? post previously - a look at some of the items mentioned in the Zend Framework, branching into a discussion of PHP's object capabilities.

Joshua Eichorn (among others) notices that active record can't work as shown in the Zend Framework webcast. The syntax presented during the web cast is not possible in PHP because of inherited static methods are treated. Mike Naberezny notes the problem and suggests that it will end up getting fixed in PHP, the sitepoint thread Trouble in Zend Framework Land?, 33degrees smells vaporware, and Elizabeth Marie Smith does too.

I look at this incident as an incredibly good omen. My optimism about Zend's PHP framework is not for the framework itself, but for what it means for OO support in PHP. In my book, the more developers that have commit access to both ZPF and to PHP, the better PHP 6 will be for me. I look at ZPF as an important step in building a culture of objects in the PHP community.

He continues, talking more about how object-oriented languages are still popping up right and left, and how PHP, at its core, needs an OO layer built on top to compare. He's not looking to belittle the OOP support in PHP, just to note that there's more work to be done - and the Zend Framework might be what pushed the development of that along...