The 7PHP.com site has posted another in its series of spotlights on people and happenings in the PHP community. In this latest edition he talks with Cal Evans about the latest Day Camp 4 Developers evening happening Friday, September 18th: "Debugging Beyond var_dump()".

Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual ‘mini’ PHP conference. Meaning you can watch in realtime 5 awesome speakers, talking about some cool quality stuffs, while you are comfortably seated on your sofa with your snacks and beverages. [...] It’s a new week on our PHP Calendar, specially in our Virtual PHP calendar – it’s THE week for DC4D which will be held on this upcoming Friday 18th Sept 2015 – see it all here, click! One very important thing to know, DC4D is heartily brought forward by our PHP Icon – the one and only Mr Cal Evans, together with his wife, The Lovely & Talented Kathy.

Cal answers questions about the event including:

• How it all started
• How he finds the speakers for the theme for each event
• Some of the things he's learned from putting on the event

The interview also includes a bonus Q&A with one of the speakers, Joshua Thijssen. They talk about Joshua's motivation behind the talk, one things that people will learn from it and what he sees as the benefit of a live presentation vs recorded.

The Zend Developer Zone site has posted a review of a recent Day Camp 4 Developers event, specifically the PSR-7 presentation from Matthew Weier O'Phiney (PSR-7 is the proposed standard for HTTP request/response interfaces).

Having a keen interest in PSR-7 myself, I was delighted to see that Matthew Weier O'Phinney (the Supreme Allied Commander of Zend Framework) was going to be speaking on it himself at the latest Day Camp 4 Developers day. [...] PSR-7 deals with specifying interfaces to define HTTP messages (namely request and response messages), and in this talk Matthew introduces the concepts around HTTP messaging, and the PSR-7 implementation that models them. Matthew is the current editor of the proposed PSR-7 standard so this talk was obviously going to be given straight from the horse's mouth.

The author (Gary Hockin) walks you through the content provided in the video including:

• an overview of the proposal
• how other languages solve the same problem
• how PST-7 will solve these same problems

Overall Gary found the talk well-presented and full of good content, especially for those just learning about PSR-7. You can find out more about Day Camp for developers and future events on their site.

Recently, the Day Camp 4 Developers announced their latest "PHP Master Series" event (Volume 2). This time there's a focus on security with four speakers (disclaimer: myself included) talking about various aspects of PHP and general security:

Having your program hacked sucks. The sad truth is though, if you put a program out there, someone will try to find a way to hack it. Especially if there is a prize on the other side.

For PHP Master Series v2, we have gathered together 4 experts on the topic of "Programming PHP Securely" to share their knowledge with you. That knowledge will help you write programs that are more difficult to hack. Programs that will keep your data, and your customers data, safer.

Each of the found speakers - Fred Alger, Mike Stowe, Anthony Ferrara and myself - are going to cover:

• 2FA: The Rise of Two-Factor Authentication
• The OWASP Top 10 and You
• Prison Theory of Web Development Security
• Password Storage (And Hacking) in PHP

You can find out more about the event (or get your tickets) from the Day Camp 4 Developers website.

If you're a developer and have considered getting out there and sharing your knowledge (via public speaking) but don't know where to start, you should check out the latest Day Camp 4 Developers happening this Friday (March 22nd).

Have you ever needed to give a presentation to your local user group? Do you need to present a topic to your team? Have you ever wanted to speak at a technical conference? If you answered yes to at least one of those questions then we are presenting Day Camp 4 Developers #5: Public Speaking for Developers just for you. We have selected 4 presenters that we feel are great at presenting technical topics. Each of them is a developer, each of them has a history of public speaking, and each of them has agreed to share what they have learned over the years.

This edition includes talks from some of the top well-known PHP community speakers:

• Laura Thomson of Mozilla
• Lorna Jane Mitchell
• Elizabeth Naramore from Github
• Keith Casey of Twilio

It's an online day-long event so you can participate from wherever you're at. You can still pick up tickets for the event from the main site - $40 USD for a single ticket, $100 USD for an "office party"

Cal Evans has officially announced his latest in his series of full-day virtual conferences aimed at PHP developers - the PHP Master Series, Volume 1 (from the Day Camp 4 Developers):

There is a lot of good information shared at conferences and sadly not event 1% of developers who identify themselves as PHP developers, ever get to attend one. This makes me sad. So I’m trying something new. [...] I went through the PHP conferences from the second-half of this year and picked out 6 that really stood out. This was a very difficult task; the PHP community and conferences are blessed with a bounty of great talks and speakers. The criteria I used was topics, joind.in score, and speaker. I tried to find talks that were on topics that are of interest to developers, that others liked, and that were given by speakers I know, and know do a good job.

This one-day virtual event is happening December 21st (a Friday) and is made up of six different talks from six different speakers:

• Designing Beautiful Software - Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Cryptography For The Average Developer - Anthony Ferrara
• Javascript Best Practices & BackboneJS for the PHP Developer - Ryan Weaver
• Your code sucks, let's fix it. - Rafael Dohms
• Building a Firehose - Ian Barber
• From POX to HATEOAS, A Real Company's Journey Building a RESTful API - Luke Stokes

You can pick up your ticket to attend for just $50 USD as a regular attendee (or voice only for those that just want to listen in). There's also an option for an "Office Party" for $100 USD if you have more than a few folks that would like to attend.

Cal Evans has announced the latest Day Camp 4 Developers (their third installment) with a focus on Project Management. It will be happening Saturday, October 1st through Sunday, October 2nd.

We’ve added a speaker this time around for a total of six and did away with the lunch break. We discovered that since we were a virtual conference , our lunch break fell at odd times if you weren’t actually in Central Time Zone – and a lot of participants weren’t. So we filled that with an additional talk.

Speakers on the list include some names PHPers will recognize including Paul Jones, Elizabeth Naramore, Keith Casey and Rob Allen. Topics for this completely virtual conference include estimation, agile practices, freelancing hints, project management techniques and dealing with difficult people.

If you're interested in the event, you can find out more about it and get your tickets from their ordering page. The cost is $40 USD for attendance/video only or $100 USD for an "office party" of more than one.

On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new post talking about two of the group's members - Ligaya Turmelle and Lorna Mitchell that will be participating in the second installment of the Day Camp 4 Developers series. This time the focus is on telecommuting.

I bring this up *not just* because it will be a great conference on a subject that is "the holy grail for many developers" - Telecommuting, but also because it will again have 2 of our members in the 5 speaker lineup - Ligaya Turmelle and Lorna Jane Mitchell.

Ligaya will bespeaking on keeping the work and life balance intact despite working from home and Lorna offers a few suggestions for you to answer the question "Could You Telecommute?". The Day Camp 4 Developers even happens Saturday, March 5th and lasts all day. There's a few different ticket options ranging from just the event out to an "Office Party" for more than one attendee.

Cal Evans has a new post to his blog today talking about the second installment in the "Day Camp 4 Developers" webcast series he's put together. This time the focus is on telecommuting.

Those of you who know me know that telecommuting, remote working or distributed teams, whatever you want to call it, is a passion of mine. I’ve written about it, spoke about it and most importantly, I live it. Now, I’ve put together 5 friends who are going to talk to you about it. They are going to cover everything from Is it right for you? to How to talk to your boss about telecommuting. If you are a developer working remote, come learn about tools and tips, if you want to be a remote worker, come figure out if it’s right for you.

The cost for the day-long event is only $35 USD and includes talks from Lorna Mitchell, Ivo Jansch, Jack Ford, Ligaya Turmelle and Avadi Grimm on a range of topics related to telecommuting. For more information or to register and reserve your spot, head over to the Day Camp 4 Developers site and get signed up. There's a few different options to sign up for - the normal pass, a pass that includes a t-shirt, a "videos only" pass and the "office party" for groups that would like to all attend at once.

Cal Evans has posted a wrapup of the "Day Camp 4 Developers" event that happened this past Saturday. The event was targeted less towards the hard tech topics and more towards the "softer side" of things like working on resumes and furthering your career.

Well, it’s done. Our first ever Day Camp 4 Developers was yesterday and was by most accounts, a rousing success. Some of the comments over at Joind.In are just wonderful. I won’t rehash all the great times and comments but I do want to list a few things I learned, even if only for myself.

Some of the things he pulled from the sessions included:

• Don’t write software, use the tools available
• Long breaks are bad
• People will forgive a LOT if the content is good
• Face-to-face still trumps cyberspace

If you're a developer are are looking on a way to brush up on some of your "soft skills" in your career of choices, you should check out this day long camp being organized by Cal Evans - Day Camp 4 Developers.

Invest a Saturday in your career. Learn the skills you need from your five camp counselors. We promise no wallets or lanyards. This one-day, technology agnostic, online conference will feature 5 sessions in a single track. You participate in this live conference from the comfort of your own home or office. (or anywhere you have internet connectivity) In addition, you will be able to download all of the sessions after the conference for off-line review.

The event will last all day - seven hours on a Saturday - and can be accessed from anywhere you have a computer to run the GoToWebinar software. There's a cost of $35 USD for each attendee or $30 USD in groups of 10 or more. If you're interested check out the Day Camp 4 Developers site or just go on and register! You can see the schedule here.