Martin Hujer has written up a guide for the Composer users out there (you do use Composer, right?) sharing seventeen tips for using it effectively to manage the dependencies in your applications.

Although most PHP developers know how to use Composer, not all of them are using it efficiently or in a best possible way. So I decided to summarize things which are important for my everyday workflow.

The philosophy of most of the tips is "Play it safe", which means that if there are more ways how to handle something, I would use the approach which is least error-prone.

His tips include:

• Be aware of differences between a "project" and a "library"
• Use version ranges for libraries dependencies
• Run Travis CI builds with different versions of dependencies
• Do not attempt to merge composer.lock when rebasing or merging
• Update dependencies safely
• You can define other types of dependencies in composer.json

Each item in the list comes with a summary and an example of the configuration related to the tip. Most of them are small tweaks to the configuration you're probably already using but there are definitely some nice "hidden gems" in there.

On the Toptal.com site there's a new post from author Timofey Nevolin sharing hist list of Eight Rules for Effective Software Production to follow to help keep your development process flowing well based on some of his own experience.

During the course of my career, I’ve participated in multiple real life software projects and observed how things are done on all levels: decision making, practices adoption, team building, recruiting, skill distribution, etc. Obviously, different approaches yielded different results. Being an improvement-oriented type of person, I noticed and collected the most effective practices and best practical tricks to help me up in my work.

Learning from observation is a hard and lengthy way to do it. I would be extremely happy to pick this knowledge earlier from books instead. Unfortunately, I found none on the topic. So I decided to share my experience with other seekers of this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, it’ll save them few years of personal research.

His list of eight, targeted mainly at those needing a productivity boost, includes rules such as:

• Understand the IT Mentality
• Stop Wasting Time on Formal Time Estimation
• Understand the Cost of Switching Tasks and Juggling Priorities
• Use Architecture Reviews as a Way to Improve System Design

He finishes with one of the more important rules to follow: valuing those on the team and respecting them for what they bring to the table.

For those out there wanting to learn more about the Laravel framework but weren't sure where to start, the Laravel News site has just the post for you. In this new guide they provide seven steps to help you learn about Laravel and its use more effectively.

As the community grows, there are many resources available to help you learn Laravel. That’s great! But, how do you choose the best one? Which will be the best use of your time to read or watch? For those new to the framework, I’m sure these questions are on your mind, here are seven tips to help you learn Laravel more effectively.

Some of these tips will be specific to Laravel, while others are more general for learning any programming language or framework.

Their steps start with some of the more foundational stuff like learning about Composer/OOP/PHP first before venturing into the framework at all. Then, with that knowledge under your belt, you can move on to the other steps: where to learn the most effectively (books, courses, videos, etc) and actually putting fingers to keys and start writing code. He makes recommendations about how to use Google and Stack Overflow to help you find what you need an, finally, the advice to find a mentor to learn from and to not give up even if you hit something difficult.

The TopTal.com site has posted some suggestions on things to ask when interviewing PHP developers, especially those shooting for a senior level role.

Ubiquitous…that is definitely one word you could use to describe PHP in relation to the web. It really is everywhere. [...] What makes PHP so popular and widely-used? While there’s no single answer to this question, PHP’s ease of use is certainly a significant contributing factor. [...] But therein lies much of the challenge of finding highly-skilled PHP developers. PHP’s relatively low barrier-to-entry and 20 year history means that PHP developers have become practically as ubiquitous as the technology itself. Yet while many can legitimately claim to “know” PHP, those who are true experts in the language are capable of producing software that is much more scalable, functional, robust, and maintainable.

There's a wide range of questions included in their list, each one with a brief description and the "right" answers a knowledgable candidate might give. This includes questions about:

• Defining and using closures
• What "global" is and when to use it
• Describing the PHP superglobals
• The use of "static"

There's also a section for the even more advanced development positions out there with questions about PHP's internals (the actual C code) as well as the differences between some built-in object types.

Scott Mattocks has started off his series about the LUCID development methodology (one he recently proposed) with the first article covering "L" for Logging.

Communication is the only way you can tell if an application is feeling well or is about to fall apart. If your application can’t talk to you, you have no way of helping it to feel better. The L in LUCID is for logging. Logs are how applications speak. They capture information that allows us to pick up on those little signs and act early enough to make sure the application doesn’t come down with the flu. If you don’t have good logging throughout your system, the best you can do is react to your application falling over. A silent application is an application destined to cause midnight surprises for you and your operations team.

He talks about the difference between "just logging" and "correct logging" as well as a recommendation for the different levels: trace, debug, info, warn and error.

Letting you know that something went wrong is really only half of a log messages job. The other responsibilities of a log message are to allow you to accurately reproduce the conditions under which the event occurred, and to allow you to fix any data inconsistencies.

In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.

Here are some bugfixing rules and tips I’ve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. I’ve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.

Topics covered include:

• Assume nothing
• Turn Error Reporting to show all errors
• Read the error message
• Understand the bug
• "Scooby-Bug, where are you?"
• Get as much information as possible

Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.

In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.

Here are some bugfixing rules and tips I’ve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. I’ve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.

Topics covered include:

• Assume nothing
• Turn Error Reporting to show all errors
• Read the error message
• Understand the bug
• "Scooby-Bug, where are you?"
• Get as much information as possible

Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!