Sometimes it's just fun to talk about all of the odd things we've done with PHP in the past. In this thread on /r/php on Reddit, developers have shared some of the "weirdest programs" they've created with the language. Here's just a sampling:

• a script which automatically wish for friend's birthday on midnight in facebook using Graph API
• a page counter
• a video watermarking and streaming tool
• a counter-bot script for preventing bot spam accounts in a game
• generate Flash SWF files
• a pulling an image from a webcam for a "real-time" Facebook cover photo
• solving quadratic equations for homework
• a "cat fax" service
• a Quake game browser

There's many, many, many more in the full post and it's interesting to see what all other developers have done. Head on over and share your weirdest PHP scripts too!

In a new tongue-in-cheek (humor) post to his site, Tomas Votruba shows you how to criticize like a senior programmer when offering feedback on code errors or architecture decisions.

As I spend most of my socials online time on Github and PHP-related discussion, I've noticed many people do so many wrong things while giving critics. I want to correct this once and for all, so I've prepared a guide for you.

His recommendations (again, the opposite of what is actually useful) include and eight step process to find a bug, never reversing your stance, repeating the same comments over and over and always telling, never asking. Following this list of "not to dos" he also includes a list of "to dos" correcting the misconceptions. This list includes:

• asking if feedback is desired
• determining your motivation for the feedback
• replacing "you" with "I"

In each recommendation there's examples of phrasing and comments that give you some guidance on how you can be more effective at giving feedback on projects and code.

On his site Matt Stauffer has a post that asks the readers about the packages they always install for their Laravel applications (and not necessarily just Laravel related packages either).

In preparation for my upcoming [talk](http://customlaravel.com/) at [Laracon 2017](https://laracon.us/), which I'm titling "Custom Laravel," I [asked a quick question](https://twitter.com/stauffermatt/status/885666786036899840) on Twitter to my followers. [...] I wanted to know for my talk, but I was also just curious for my own purposes. Are there any packages I should check out that everyone else already knows about? Here's what I found, in order of the number of recommendations I received...

While most of the packages in his lists (unanimous support, well-loved, etc) are Laravel specific, mostly because of his audience on Twitter, there are some that weren't. These included:

• Fractal
• Doctrine DBAL
• PHP Mess Detector
• Deployer

You can check out his full listing in the remainder of the post and a link to another listing from Mike Erickson asking the same kind of question.

On the Laravel Daily site they've posted an interview with Bobby Bouwmann, one of the most active (and awarded) members of the Laracasts website. Laracasts is an online learning site for instruction on the use of the Laravel framework and related technologies.

In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.

In the interview Bobby answers questions about:

• what drives him to participate in the forum
• what value he finds in Laracasts
• how he handles "developers" that don't bother looking for answers in documentation
• what he does when he sees the same question asked over and over

His final answer offers some advice to Jeffrey Way about the forum itself, making a suggestion of how to improve it by "keeping the forum clean".

The /Dev/Hell podcast, hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode 84: Whiny Feedback Loops.

Chris and Ed record a very quick show to talk about Ed’s latest conference adventure, the launch of some new stuff from OSMI, and Chris talks about feedback loops, hoodies that don’t fit, and the end of TrueNorthPHP.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to follow their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

In the latest tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog author Wern Ancheta shows you how to integrate your application with the Microsoft Text Analytics API, a service offered by the company putting machine learning to work on things like keyword extraction, topic detection and language detection.

With the explosion of machine learning services in recent years, it has become easier than ever for developers to create “smart apps”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to Microsoft’s offering for providing machine-learning capabilities to apps. Specifically, you’ll learn about the Text Analytics API and build an app to enhance the understanding of online sellers when it comes to their customers.

The tutorial then introduces the Microsoft Cognitive Services API and, more specifically, the Text Analytics API that they'll be hooking the application in to. They walk you through getting an API key for the service, creating an "account" for the application you're working with and deploying it for immediate use. They introduce the functionality of the API with a few "play" examples of each API offered before getting into the creation of their sample application - a tool that reviews the contents of customer feedback, looking for key phrases and returns highlighted versions with what it sees as important.

TutsPlus.com has posted the latest part of their "Building Your Startup with PHP" series following along with the creation of a "meeting planner" application based on the Yii2 framework. In this new article the focus is on collecting and managing user feedback and reports for a simple support system.

In this series, I'm guiding you through launching a startup from concept to reality using my Meeting Planner app as a real-life example. Every step along the way, I'll release the Meeting Planner code as open-source examples you can learn from. I'll also address startup-related business issues as they arise.

In this tutorial, I'm going to guide you through how I quickly and economically launched a support system and knowledge base for the application as well as some of the issues and alternatives I considered.

He starts with some of the third-party options he considered including Zendesk, Grove and Freshdesk. In the end he decided to go with the last option as it had the startup-friendly combination of a free account for small business and good functionality at that level. He covers their pricing levels, the signup process and the basic usage of the account and hooking it into Mailgun for sending/receiving emails. He also walks you through customizing the domain to match yours and updating the code to make the "Support" URLs match the new Freshdesk setup.

The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has released their latest episode today - Episode #98: Instant Feedback on your Pizza Oven, a discussion on quick feedback cycles, MVCC in Databases and Type Systems

On this weeks episode Edd and Mick start off discussion around productivity, quick feedback cycles with clients and building pizza ovens. We then move on to chat about how Edd ‘maybe’ accident prone, how MVCC works at a high-level and why you need to vacuum your tables in Postgres. Finally, we bring up Uncle Bob’s recent ‘Type Wars’ article and highlight the different variants of typing (static, dynamic, weak and strong).

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly and enjoying at your leisure. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get the latest updates on new shows as they're released.

A while back the SitePoint PHP blog did a survey asking for reader feedback about the content they provide, what they thought was good/bad about it and what they'd like to see more of in the future. In this new post they share some of these results.

On the last day of 2015, we published a survey asking you, the readers, for an opinion about the PHP channel. It was a pretty open survey with mostly freeform answers allowed, so you could tell us literally anything. All in all, we collected 78 responses so far (the survey will remain open indefinitely, in case someone wants to give us more feedback).

On the average satisfaction scale, we scored 7.42 out of 10, and that’s without excluding the potential trolls who voted 1. That’s a very good result, but we’re determined to improve it further.

The rest of the post then gets into the results in detail, talking about:

• overall satisfaction with the blog and its contents
• opinions on the newsletter
• author feedback
• favorite types of posts
• their presence on social media

They end the post with a summary of the things people wanted the most out of the site including more demos/practical examples and more PHP 7-related content. While these results are mostly applicable to the SitePoint PHP blog, they also can be applied a bit more widely across the community and on other sites that publish articles with technical content.

If you've been to any PHP conference (or attended a PHP-related online event) in recent years, you probably have heard of the speaker/event feedback site Joind.in. The concept is simple: when you attend a talk or event you go to the site, give the speaker a star rating and leave them comments. This gives the speakers direct feedback on how they did and where they can improve. There's a a trick to giving valuable feedback, though, and Joshua Thijssen has posted some helpful tips to guide you and your comments in the right direction.

The joind.in website can be considered a presenter’s portfolio: it contains a list of talks they have done in the past (and where), plus it contains reviews from attendees. [...] This is why many conferences and presenters will talk about joind.in and ask you to rate and comments on their talks: it gives them feedback on how you experienced the talk, what can be improved to make it even better, and gives the presenters more chance to get accepted on even the larger conferences, where sometimes there are only 50 slots, but over 500 people submitted talks).

[...] Even though commenting and rating talks by itself isn’t really difficult and is quick to do so, there are some common “mistakes” and pitfalls which I’d like to discuss.

He breaks it down into five main points, elaborating on each as he goes through them:

1. Stars don’t tell you everything
2. Rate the presentation and speaker, not your expectations.
3. Don’t punish the presenter for external faults
4. Comment anonymously
5. Give suggestions on how to improve

For each one he also gives examples of good feedback versus comments that aren't as helpful to the speaker. Each one of these is an easy trap to slip in to, so remember them next time you're giving a speaker feedback (even if it's not on Joind.in!).