The PHP Town Hall podcast, with hosts Ben Edmunds and Phil Sturgeon, has posted their latest episode - Episode #25: "Girls Aren't Any Different".

Talking about feminism in tech is always difficult. This episode was quite a heated discussion with Kayla Daniels and Jessica D’Amico discussing their opinions about women-orientated groups such as PHPWomen and Girls Who Code. Kayla wrote an excellent article titled Not a shiny unicorn, in which she made several points. [...] Essentially saying that specialist groups that try to help nurture female involvement can be seen - by some - to be a little patronising, like girls need special help, etc. Also whenever people freakout in the office because there is “a girl” there, things get weird.

While they admit that the session could have been more of a "representative conversation or interesting listening", plenty of points about the topic of feminism in technology-related work are still discussed with some good perspectives on either side. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 (no video for this one, unfortunately).

The PHP Town Hall podcast has posted their latest episode - Episode #8, "Use Your Time Machine to Go to PeersConf Yesterday"

In this episode Ben and Phil talk to the super-talented conference organiser Jessica D’Amico, joined by avid conference goer and PHP rockstar Matt Frost. We all gab a bunch about conferences in general, specifically LaraCon, PeersConf and php|tek. We fucked up and didn’t get this episode out soon enough to actually get her any sales for her latest conferences PeersConf (Phil is at PeersConf right now), but you should definitely follow Jess to see what conferences she puts on in the future, they’re always great.

You can listen to this episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this and other new episodes as they're released.