On his Medium.com site D. Nagy Gergo shares some "neat Laravel features" he's come across in his time developing with the framework.

We passed a year again, (oh, Happy New Year, before we forget), so we decided to collect some features from the Laravel framework that added in the previous year.

There were two big version changes, 5.4 in January and 5.5 in August. Of course, the big releases brought huge changes, but we try to focus on those that added during the year, without any bigger announcement.

In his list he includes functionality like:

• the "tap" and "when" methods for collection handling
• API route handling
• new Blade directives around Guards
• using "artisan" to build out correct model factories
• the "firstWhere" method to find and return the first match in a model

Each of the items in the list include a brief summary of the feature and a link to more information about it in the manual.

On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted a guide sharing some of the new features that have come with the 5.2 version of the Laravel framework. With v5.3 on the horizon, it's good to get a solid base with 5.2 first.

In this article, I will take a look at the new features of Laravel 5.2 and describe them one by one. The new features are [...]: implicit route model binding, form array validation, API rate-limiting middleware, middleware groups, authentication scaffold and multiple authentication guard drivers

The post then goes through each of these topics providing a bit of explanation of what they're about and how they can be useful. There's also snippets of code included where helpful to show off the feature and provide a more useful example.

In his latest post Ben Ramsey suggests that "yak shaving" (a seemingly useless activity that lets you solve an immediate problem) is a core part of what we, as developers, do.

When I began my journey as a programmer, every task was fraught with problems, and I loved it. Everything was new, and every problem was an opportunity to learn and grow. It was great.

Somewhere along the way, though, problems became nuisances. As I grew older in life and my career, my tolerance for problems became lower, and my desire for things to Just Work became greater.

As I struggled to find a solution for the problem I had with Packer, Tate Eskew reminded me that yak shaving is a part of my job.

In his example he was working with Packer and hit a problem with the environment required to get it working. Instead of slogging through it he created a patch to make it work correctly with Amazon Machine Images.

The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode, Episode 13: Job Descriptions and Interviews. Join hosts Matt Frost and Jeff Carouth as they talk about issues around the hiring process (from their experience) and deciphering the language of the job posting.

In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about how to look at job descriptions and what to expect during interviews for the jobs you really want to have. They will combine their experiences on both sides of the interview room and reminisce about good and bad interview experiences. Interviewing may be stressful, but it’s how you advance your career.

You can listen to their latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 of the live recording for listening offline. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get the latest shows as they're released.

Christopher Martinez has a recent post to his site that covers some of the static analysis tools available for PHP including the PHP Mess Detector, PHP CodeSniffer and the PHP Analyzer.

I believe in writing code that is easy to understand, easy to test, and easy to refactor. Yes, I realize that the statement above is pretty general and open to interpretation. Not everyone needs external tools to ensure quality in their code...but, I work on things from time to time that have absolutely no tests. [...] For whatever reason, this happens a lot more frequently in the PHP world. I'm guilty of not writing tests and checking how I write code, sometimes, too. Things are bright, though, for the PHP community - for quite some time now, we've had fantastic tools that assist us in writing better code.

He covers each of the tools, talks some about what they're good for and gives examples of their use, including output. He also talks some about the Pfff set of tools created by Facebook. He also talks some about how these tools fit into his daily work as a part of his pre-commit hooks in git.

On the ZFort Group's site today there's a new post sharing an infrographic about frameworks in PHP. The data was gathered from Google Trends and looks at popularity and provides some detail for each.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from other sources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.

In this recent post to his blog Abhinav Singh looks at caching - more specifically looking at four different caching options: WP-Cache, APC, memcache and the query cache.

Ever since I changed my job (from Business Intelligence to Web development) and started working with my present employer, I have had a chance to work on a lot of scalable projects. From making my project to scale from 20 Million PV's to 100 Million PV's to development of an internal tool, the answer to all scalable applications have been caching. [...] Here in this post I would like to pen down my experiences while working with all the caching mechanism. Their pros and cons. What things you need to take care while working with them and every little tit bit which comes to my mind while writing this post.

For each of the four options he describes what kind of caching they're good for, what they can do and a few "gotchas" to keep an eye out for when implementing them in your application.

Andi Gutmans has good news for anyone out thre that has wanted to get involved with the Zend Framework on a more official level - they're looking to grow the core team:

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.

Andi Gutmans has good news for anyone out thre that has wanted to get involved with the Zend Framework on a more official level - they're looking to grow the core team:

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.

From PHPit.net, there's this article posted that takes a look at ten of the more prominent PHP frameworks offered today, including the Zend Framework, Cake, Symfony, and Seagull. They compare each of them, including a large chart outlining their basic setup and features.

PHP frameworks are the latest hot topic in the PHP community, and new frameworks are being released daily. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers different functionality.

In this article we will look at ten popular frameworks, and compare them to each other. First I will give you a general chart which gives you a quick overview of all the frameworks, and after that we'll go through each framework and discuss it in short.

They start with the chart mentioned above for those that just want to boiled down version of the reviews. From there, they work through each, describing general details about them and the general feel that the author got from them as they developed in them. Of course, there is no real "winner" when it comes to this kind thing. Sure, there's always a few that rise to the top as more well developed and suited for more of the projects out there, but it's really more about what fits for you, not an overarching single framework to do it all...