The /Dev/Hell podcast has posted the latest episode of their show, Episode #42 - Hacking Difficult People. This show features hosts Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes joind by guest Laura Thomson, a Manager at Mozilla.

For episode 42 we are blessed by the wonderful and talented Laura Thomson, Senior Engineering Manager at Mozilla. Laura drops science on managing engineers, Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, HHVM and Hack, and her mid-Atlantic coast accent. This is a must-listen for folks who manage tech teams.

Some of the topics mentioned in this episode include RCS, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", the HHVM blog and the CodeIgniter project's search for a new home. You can listen to this episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

Robert Eisele has a new post (and some new source) on his blog today that has gotten the PHP community both up in arms and excited about the potential it offers - a fork of PHP that's been modified to include lots of little improvements for changes in performance, some new PHP functions, usability improvements and changes in the MySQLi/mysqlnd drivers.

It took me a while but here's a new toy. Today I publish my own PHP fork based on the PHP 5.3.6 code base with a few changes that make the everydays developer life more bearable. It includes some of the patches I've already published about 3 years ago, my defcon extension and also my infusion extension plus a good bunch of extra gimmickries.

Updates in his release available on github) include:

• Hardcoded constants
• Turn off $_REQUEST variable if it's not needed
• new methods like str_random, ob_fwrite, sigfig and strcal
• changes in foreach, strstr and binary number handling
• updates to MySQLi/mysqlnd to return matched rows and mysqi_return

The community reaction to this fork has been divided - some think the work put into these changes should have been submitted to the main PHP project instead and others see it as a good step forward for the language. Share your thoughts by commenting on the post.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted some information about PHP's presence at this year's LinuxTag Conference where there will be no official PHP track, but will be several PHP-related talks.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted some information about PHP's presence at this year's LinuxTag Conference where there will be no official PHP track, but will be several PHP-related talks.