In his latest post Matthew Turland has shared some of his thoughts about how to be a better developer, regardless of the language or skill level you may find yourself at.

I’ve shamefully ripped off the title for this blog post from what I expect will be a phenomenal session given by Ed Finkler at php[tek] 2014. Sadly, I haven’t seen the session and may not be present at the conference. However, I’ve spoken with Ed and seen him give sessions on several occasions, so I know he sets the bar pretty high. If you’ve not considered attending the conference and his session, I highly recommend doing so. Ed has plenty of insightful things to say about being a great developer. Today, the subject coincidentally crossed my mind and I realized I had a few things to say on the matter that may also prove useful to others.

He suggests that there are three main qualities that developers need to become better at their craft and, as a positive side effect, work better with other developers around them. These three points are:

• Humility
• Patience
• Imperfection

For each, he briefly explains the topic and makes some practical suggestions for achieving the goal.

These are things I’ve learned from my own experiences. I state them here realizing that they may be more applicable to me than they are to you. You must form your own opinions and find your own wisdom. [...] In the end, you must find your own path. Regardless of what that path is, I hope you find the passion shared by myself and those who inspire me and I wish you well in your pursuits.

In a new post today, Martynas Jusevicius shows how to combine a little SQL magic with the Propel framework to fins the distance between two places:

Eventually the simple distance formula that I have blogged about turned out to be too inaccurate, even for locations within city bounds. I needed to use a formula to calculate great-circle distance which takes into account that the Earth is a sphere.

He includes the SQL to pull the data in the right format and the PHP code (using Propel) to reproduce it without having to write it by hand (complete with the bind variables to help with security and consistency).

On his blog today, Andi Gutmans has posted his feelings on the growing trend of PHP developers turnng to the C level of things to add new functionality to the PHP development.

One thing I have noticed, is that quite often, PHP developers who are seeking for new PHP features are prematurely trying to implement them in C. Although, there are definitely cases where you want to write your code in C, I think in some cases PHP is too quickly dismissed.

Developing features in PHP not only takes less time, but is also less prone to bugs, easier to maintain, and more stable and secure. Also, in the majority of cases, whether such a feature were implemented in C or PHP, would not make a significant different to overall application performance.

He gives the example of the ZSearch functionality that they mentioned in the php|architect webcast for the Zend framework - entirely implemented in PHP, not C. He also mentions a point that web developers would do good to take to heart - the bottlenecks usually aren't in the code - it's dealing with external resources that's the problem...

On his blog today, Andi Gutmans has posted his feelings on the growing trend of PHP developers turnng to the C level of things to add new functionality to the PHP development.

One thing I have noticed, is that quite often, PHP developers who are seeking for new PHP features are prematurely trying to implement them in C. Although, there are definitely cases where you want to write your code in C, I think in some cases PHP is too quickly dismissed.

Developing features in PHP not only takes less time, but is also less prone to bugs, easier to maintain, and more stable and secure. Also, in the majority of cases, whether such a feature were implemented in C or PHP, would not make a significant different to overall application performance.

He gives the example of the ZSearch functionality that they mentioned in the php|architect webcast for the Zend framework - entirely implemented in PHP, not C. He also mentions a point that web developers would do good to take to heart - the bottlenecks usually aren't in the code - it's dealing with external resources that's the problem...