The /dev/hell podcast has released their latest episode with special guest Brian Moon (of dealnews).

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Richard Thomas has a reminder for all of those out there that think frameworks can solve all of the development woes of the world - remember, "frameworks are hammers".

What Framework is the best? What Framework is the fastest? What Framework is the easiest? All of these questions have been asked or answered by pretty much any programmer that exists but what is the true correct answer? [...] At the end of the day any Framework is like a good hammer, it gets the job it needs to do done.

He notes that, while some hammers can do some pretty special things, most of the hammers out there still do the same basic job and do it well. Your choice of framework is more about what you're comfortable with than the fact that you need to make a website.