On the KillerPHP.com site there's a new post that compares two popular languages - PHP and Python and tries to answer the question "Which one should I learn?"

One question I get often, is which programming language should you learn? I’ve been getting this question for years!

Things change in the programming world, languages come and go. But the good news is that the basics, the core concepts and techniques, are 90-95% the same in all the modern programming languages. [...] What that means, is that your programming language choice, isn’t nearly as critical as you’d think. Why? Well, once you know one programming language, it is easy as apple pie to switch to another!

He then gives some of his own thoughts about how you could decide which language you should pick including the kinds of programming (target result) and what kinds of jobs you can get with each.

On the Laravel News site there's a new article posted about a big change coming to the "app" folder in Laravel-based applications (hint: it's moving towards more simple, not more complex).

As we are getting closer to the launch of Laravel 5.3 new features, seem to come out almost daily. The latest is a change to the “App” folder and in a move to simplify it, the Events, Jobs, Listeners, and Policies folders are now gone.

You can still get them back if you "artisan make" something that fits in one of these four folders but, as they're not really "required" by default they were removed to do some de-cluttering. If you want to find out more about what else is coming/changing in Laravel 5.3, check out this other article also on the Laravel News site.

The latest episode of the Laravel Podcast, hosted by Matt Stauffer with guests Jeffrey Way and Taylor Otwell, has been posted - Episode #34: Jobs & Jawas

In this episode, Matt and Taylor are joined by Ian Landsman of UserScape. Ian is the founder of UserScape, the creator of HelpSpot, and the man behind LaraJobs. The crew discusses hiring, being a good job candidate, and most importantly: Star Wars.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter for more information about the show and future episodes.

The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode, Episode 13: Job Descriptions and Interviews. Join hosts Matt Frost and Jeff Carouth as they talk about issues around the hiring process (from their experience) and deciphering the language of the job posting.

In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about how to look at job descriptions and what to expect during interviews for the jobs you really want to have. They will combine their experiences on both sides of the interview room and reminisce about good and bad interview experiences. Interviewing may be stressful, but it’s how you advance your career.

You can listen to their latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 of the live recording for listening offline. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get the latest shows as they're released.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the second part of his series with some tips around application deployment with Zend Server. In this latest post he shares his second tip related to recurring jobs.

This is the second in a series of eight posts detailing tips on deploying to Zend Server.The previous post in the series detailed getting started with zf-deploy to create ZPK packages to deploy to Zend Server. Today, I'm looking at how to created scheduled/recurring jobs using Zend Server's Job Queue; think of this as application-level cronjobs.

Instead of running the jobs as cron tasks (which may or may not be installed if there's multiple servers), he opts for a software-based approach. He walks you through the use of the Zend Server Job Queue to create a simple reoccurring execution to run a PHP script at a certain time. He includes some code examples with one showing just the scheduling of a job and the other showing how to detach previous jobs and add only the new ones that weren't scheduled before.

Cal Evans has a new post to his site with a great suggestion for those looking to hire PHP developers: get your jobs page right and show that you have a good "developer culture" to attract good, solid talent.

When building an online strategy for finding developers to hire, start with your web site. It is amazing that so many companies miss this totally or mess this step up. Make sure you have a top level menu item that is easy to identify as “this is where we post jobs”. Call it “Jobs”, “Careers”, “Work with us” whatever, just make sure it’s in the top level of your menu and not something that people have to dig down into your site to get to.

He also suggests that you treat the "Jobs" page as an important part of the site. Vague or incomplete descriptions of the positions turn off developers and will make them move on to something else. Link to the deeper details and don't overwhelm the viewer with it all up front. He gives two examples of companies that he thinks have gotten it right and how it reflects on their investment in developer culture.

So step 0 in the process of finding developers to work on your team is to build a culture of respect. If you get this right, attracting developers – attracting the best developers – will be easy. Get this wrong though, nothing else will matter. Remember, developer talk to each other within their community. They will know if you are not a good place to work.

On Reddit.com there's a post sharing some opinions on where to look for PHP jobs and find "the good ones" out of the sea of positions.

I don't want to make this a "hire me" post, because that would and should get downvoted, but where would a person go to find interesting PHP related job ads in 2013? Some of the older big job sites like Monster and Dice are a barren wasteland of boring recruiters hiring for defense contractors, health insurance companies and low end agencies. Github has a small but decent section. Stack Overflow has some decent ones. Hacker news has a monthly thread, but a strong anti-PHP hipster bias. Reddit, at least from search has so few that I find 2 year old ones.

The responses range from links to specific companies looking for people out to some more general resources like LinkedIn, Craigslist, and yes, even recruiters (just be sure to pick a good one).

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their January 2013 meeting, a loo at the "Current Trends of the PHP and Open Source Job Market" (from Ari Waller):

The presentation will be an overview of the current employment market and outlook specifically for PHP developers (as well as other Open Source related Open Source trends), based on the current supply and demands in the market place, as well as career oriented topics via Q&A (Resumes, Interviews, and overall job hunting tips and strategies). Ari will cover a year by year comparison from his previous talk and discuss changes and new trends going into 2013. He will also discuss how to work with recruiters as effectively as possible (if at all), as well as questions you have always wanted to ask regarding the the inner workings of IT Staffing.

Despite it being presented by a recruitment company, they have promised an open and honest conversation about the topic, not a sales pitch. If you'd like to attend, check out this page on the Atlanta PHP site for more information - including a new meeting location.

Have a user group meeting or event you'd like announced? let us know!

Lorna Mitchell has a new post today about using a popular backend processing tool, Gearman, from inside of PHP. Her example gives a full overview of how to add a new job and write the worker for it to make things happen.

Basically, this application generates some PDFs from a variety of data sources, makes images, and emails it. Since the whole data processing, image handling, PDF generation process is fairly heavy, I'm putting the requests to generate these onto a gearman queue and having some workers process the jobs.

You'll need to have the Gearman server and extension installed (sample instructions here for Ubuntu) to use the sample code she gives using the Gearman_Client and GearmanWorker objects to create the pieces of the puzzle. You can find out more about the Gearman PECL extension here.

As most people involved in the IT sector know, demand is growing all the time for qualified people to fill the spots companies really need. In a new article from NetworkWorld.com they talk about some of the current trends as to what skills companies are really looking for right now including people with solid experience with Open Source development and tools.

Industry watchers report that while an economic recovery won't guarantee that IT jobs return to pre-recession levels, increased interest in emerging and existing technologies will drive internal training and external hiring decisions. [...] Here we examine 10 IT job titles that could gain traction in 2010 as new technology demands require evolving IT skills.

The list includes specializations like security specialists, capacity planning, network engineers, business process engineers and Open Source specialists that have the knowledge and the skills to either create or bring in the Open Source tools that would fit the need the best. They even quote Dice.com about the increase in popularity those sorts of postings/searches have been getting lately.