In a recent interview posted on the O'Reilly Radar site, Msc Slocum talks with Kevin Tatroe about what Facebook's HipHop means for business.

Facebook's PHP overhaul, HipHop, reportedly cut CPU usage on the company's servers by around 50 percent. You don't have to be a programmer to understand that kind of result. [...] asked Kevin Tatroe, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming PHP, to weigh in on HipHop's functionality and its broader applications.

Mac starts with some basic questions - how will it help developers, how will it help businesses - and then asks for some clarification as to what the project really is and how difficult Kevin thinks it will be for companies to adopt.

As a part of the Please Start From The Beginning video series, Andrei Zmievski was interviewed about how he got into web development and PHP.

Please Start From The Beginning is a video series that explores the career paths and experiences of web industry professionals. I was honored to be interviewed for the series along with such interesting people as Eric Meyer, Joe Stump, and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Here's the summary from this episode:

Andrei Zmievski is a web developer and founding member of Analog, prior to this he was Open Source Fellow at Digg and a platform engineer at Yahoo. Andrei is also a core developer of PHP and a member of the PHP Group.

On the Tutsplus.com site today there's an new interview with Jason Lengstorf, a developer who specializes in PHP & jQuery applications and the author of the PHP for Absolute Beginners book (from APress).

He's the author of the recently released PHP for Absolute Beginners, which is an expert's voice in open source. Additionally, he co-authored an eight-part tutorial on Creating a Web App from Scratch with Chris Coyier. Join us as we discuss web development, PHP, and his life in general.

They talk about his background, how he got started in web development and what he thinks are the best ways to start learning PHP (and jQuery and CSS). They also mention some of his favorite resources, what kind of environment he's used to and other things he's involved in.

In this latest post from the PHPClasses.org blog, Manuel Lemos looks at a class designed specifically for working with Arabic data in PHP - Ar-PHP - and interviews its lead developer, Khaled Al-Shamaa.

Arabic is a language spoken in many countries. The number of PHP developers from countries that use the Arabic language has been growing a lot. Currently it represents almost 2% of the users that access the PHPClasses site. The Arabic language writing direction is from right to left. It requires the use of a non-Latin character set. These facts raise special challenges to developers willing to build sites with Arabic text. Khaled Al-Shamaa, a PHP developer from Syria has written a library of classes named Ar-PHP. It address many of the challenges of building Arabic sites in PHP.

They talk about who Khaled is, look at a general overview of the project, what kinds of things are in the future for the library and what kind of difference PHP6 will make.

Following some of his recent experience in finding a new source of employment, Brandon Savage has shared some of the common questions he was given during his search for a PHP development position.

There are a large number of PHPers looking for jobs right now. After having just gone through the process myself, I wanted to put together some of the most common PHP interview questions. These questions are all non-technical, but do represent the soft side of PHP interviewing. I cannot help you if you don't have the technical skills to answer the technical questions, but answering these questions correctly is often the key to making or breaking your chances with an interviewer who otherwise has fine technical candidates.

Questions he was asked included "How did you get into PHP?", "Where do you ultimately want to be in life?" and the more random "How many gas stations are there in Los Angeles?". For each, Brandon recommends a few tips on dealing with them and includes some possible tactics on answering.

Brandon Savage has a suggestion for those interviewing developers for positions at their company - forget the coding test.

One thing I've noticed in hunting for a job recently is the number of companies that insist that you write them a code sample to spec. Not just any code sample, but a fully functional, complete application. This is absurd, for several reasons.

He suggests that, while submitting example code or taking a test as a part of the interview process can be a "first line" to be sure the person knows the language, they shouldn't be considered useful much beyond that. He likens it to people in other trades (like a plumber or electrician) to do their job before they can do their job...for you. Brandon suggests that the real key to a developer - how well they can learn - just can't be measured by a test like this.

The php|architect podcast has posted its latest episode today - an interview with Marcus Whitney of Enterprise LAMP, a group putting on a conference and summit November 6th and 7th near Nashville, TN.

Despite Skype's best attempts at sabotage, Marcus paints an interesting story of how he became involved in PHP, learned to manage really large installation through his work at Emma and got inspired to create the upcoming Enterprise LAMP, which will be hosting its first conference in Nashville, TN, in just a few weeks.

As always you can listen to the podcast in one of three ways - the in-page player, downloading the mp3 and subscribing to their feed to get it delivered directly to your aggregator.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has posted a new entry with an interview from a Microsoft representative (Galileu Vieira) about their latest effort to help out the web development market - the WebsiteSpark program.

The good news is that Microsoft just launched a new initiative named WebsiteSpark. It aims to promote the careers of PHP and other Web professionals in general that are interested in specializing in the Microsoft technologies. Therefore I invited Galileu Vieira , a manager of the Microsoft subsidiary in Brazil, to give an interview and clarify what is this initiative and how the PHP professionals may benefit from it.

They talk about the goals of the project, what's included in the startup package Microsoft would provide, the training available and where you can get more information.

The latest episode of the php|architect podcast has been released - an interview with Andrew Sampson, producer of stephenfy.com, the website of "actor/writer/polymath Stephen Fry".

This week's interview with Andrew Sampson is a perfect example of what we are trying to accomplish. Andrew produces stephenfry.com, actor/writer/polymath Stephen Fry's website. By his own admission (although we suspect he's just being modest), Andrew is not a technical person, but thanks to PHP and WordPress he and a small team run a website that handles tremendous amounts of traffic while working with someone like Stephen Fry, who travels constantly and therefore needs to be able to work in a distributed environment.

You can check out this new episode in one of two ways - either via the in-page player or in a direct download from the php|architect site.

Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interview the DevExp.eu website recently did with him as a member of the PHP and general Open Source communities.

Stefan has a wide history in Open Source, having been Support Team Leader for phpBB, documentation translator for Zend Framework and community manager, plugin developer and maintainer plus various other things for symfony.

Topics mentioned in the interview include Stefan's current projects, how he learned what he has about software development, what kind of hobbies or interests he has and a few "quick answer" questions with Stefan's responses in five words or less.