The Laravel Podcast, hosted by Matt Stauffer with guests Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way, has released is latest episode - Episode #36: Dev School.

In this episode, the crew talks about the challenges of learning to be a developer, developer bootcamps, advice to their former selves, and even their favorite clothes.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter to get updated when new episodes are released.

Joshua Thijssen has a quick new post today talking about debugging Symfony components, sharing a simple but useful hint.

Don’t you hate it when you are stepping through your debugger during a Symfony application debug session, and all of a sudden it cannot find files anymore as Symfony uses code located in the bootstrap.php.cache instead of the actual Symfony component. Symfony creates these cache-classes in order to speed up execution, but it makes that xdebug cannot find the correct code to step through anymore.

He found a solution in a few changes to his "app_dev.php" bootstrap file to alter the location of the autoloader and disable cache loading. This prevents issues with Symfony trying to access cached versions and use the actual files and locations, making debuggers much more happy.

Jordi Boggiano has a new post to his site about a recent update to the Composer tool that can help make managing development-only dependencies a bit easier.

Using require-dev in Composer you can declare the dependencies you need for development/testing. It works in most simple cases, but when the dev dependencies overlap with the regular ones, it can get tricky to handle. In too many cases it also tends to just fail at resolving dependencies with quite strange error messages. Since this was quite unreliable, I set out to rework the whole feature this week-end. The patch has been merged, and it fixes six open issues which is great.

Additionally, to make it easier to work with the development dependencies, they'll by default be installed when you run an "update" in your repository. If you don't want them, you can still use "--no-dev". Also, Composer will manage them in a seperate section from the normal "require" packages. If you're not using Composer to manage your application's dependencies, look over on getcomposer.org for more details.