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.

NetTuts.com has started off the week on a humorous note with this latest post showing the "11 Phases of a Web Developer's Career" as illustrated with animated GIFs of various internet memes.

The career of a web developer is an interesting one with many slopes. Considering a learning curve this steep, you can fully expect to live through periods of frustration, enlightenment, self-righteousness, and every mindset in between. In this article, we’ll have some fun, by reviewing each of these phases through the lens of a meme!

Some of the phases include:

• Phase 1 - Noob
• Phase 3 – Complete Frustration
• Phase 5 – Fragile Code
• Phase 7 – Cocky
• Phase 9 – When Code Becomes Art
• Phase 10 – Seasoned

Check out the post for the images of these and the others on their "top 11" list.

A new blog has started up that mentions some of the "masterpieces" that occur in the PHP manual - phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com:

Sparkling gems found in the official PHP documentation, mostly in the user-submitted comments. Not meant to pick on anyone, just to serve as a source of wonderment.

There's already several posts to the blog including:

• Here's my int, so cast it maybe
• Two quotes that make me sad
• Two's Complewhat
• The documentation clearly says raptors

You can subscribe to their RSS feed if you'd like to keep up.

On the Added Bytes blog there's a humorous post about what PHP would be like if it were British:

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. [...] He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English". PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking?

Suggestions include replacing the $ with £, more correct "Hello worlds" and comments on abbreviations in function names, eloquence in control structures, spelling, manners and class(es). Check out the comments for more lovely puns.

Jeremy Kendall has started up a new blog that's a sort of "WTF in PHP" listing of some of the random (and bad) code that he comes across daily - CSI:PHP.

It all began with a new gig and an amazingly horrific codebase. I began tweeting the most unbelievable, most frustrating snippets I could find. After quite a few of those tweets, Chris Hartjes replied with, "Looking at your tweets I cannot even fathom what your job is. CSI:PHP ?" A concept was born.

Some of the posts so far include eval() hell, a bad use of preg_replace and a bad method for calling mail(). Currently there's not a way for others to contribute their own code WTFs, but from what I hear it's possible for the future.

Bastien Labelle has posted a new (tongue-in-cheek) post to his blog today about a presentation he and a friend of his recently gave at a conference - Why PHP is so Much Better than Ruby.

Of course, saying that PHP is so much better than Ruby is pure bullshit, and this talk is, as I hope you guessed, a big big sarcasm. Trolling apart, I think this talk is also quite interesting, since somehow it shows some of the weaknesses of Ruby and its ecosystem.

Included in the post are their slides and a brief transcript of the main points they mentioned. Also interesting are some of the comments mentioning the typing issues the talk discussed and the fact that popularity isn't the same as quality.

In a new post to his site, Najaf Ali has a tongue-in-cheek article about "why PHP is better than Ruby", a sarcastic look at the differences between the two languages with one winning out as a favorite.

PHP is better than ruby. There, I said it. In this article I'm going to show you why, and probably upset some twenty-something, flip-flop clad, mac-using hippie fanboys in the process.

He lists a few differences between the two languages - objects in Ruby, syntax and readability, object handling in PHP and Ruby's ability to redefine any classes - even core ones. Here's a hint for reading this article though - don't take it too seriously, it's in good fun.