The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, with host and PHP community member Cal Evans, has posted their latest episode. In this new interview with a member of the PHP community Cal talks with Josh Holmes (@joshholmes).

Cal and Josh talk about his current role at Microsoft, how it involves Open Source software and the team he works with (a part of the Developer Experience group). They also talk about what the team does for the customers they work with and some of the groups they're currently helping. The show notes link to two of the "frameworks" they've put together to help in these efforts too: Nitrogen.io and IoT Hub. They also talk about the Particle project and the case studies/code they're sharing based on their work and findings.

You can listen to this latest interview either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest on when new episodes are released.

Paul Jones has posted a few notes to his blog about the latest Nashville PHP User Group (the first after the group had faded somewhat) including a mention of the main talk from Josh Holmes.

My favorite part of these things (as always) is meeting the other attendees. We retired to a nearby bar after the meeting, where I cliqued up with Brian Dailey, Ryan Weaver, Jeremy Kendall, and others.

Topics that came up during that discussion included the books "Mythical Man Month", "Fooled By Randomness" and "Managing the Next Society".

You can find out more about the Nashville PHP User Group from their website including meeting times, location and future topics.

Josh Holmes (a Microsoft Evangelist) recently gave a presentation about getting PHP applications, specifically WordPress to work better on a Windows-based platform (whether it be running on a physical server or something like Azure).

I talked about the amazing improvements in FastCGI over the past few years, the Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer (WebPI), URL Redirect, WinCache and many other things that Microsoft is doing to embrace open source technologies.

The slides for the talk are over on Slideshare but if you want something a little more engaging, check out the webcast from php|architect this coming Friday (April 9th) by Mark Brown and Ruslan Yakushev on the same subject.

If you're in or near the Dublin, Ireland area and are interested at all in developing web applications on Microsoft's Azure platform, you really should check out a new post on the EchoLibre blog with details on a presentation from Josh Holmes (of Microsoft) that'll be happening On February 21st.

As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric - in particular PHP and Ruby. [...] So, this month Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform.

It's a free event and all who are interested are welcome to come. It'll start February 21st at 7:30pm (19:30) at the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. There's no charge for the event, but you still need to register to reserve a spot - there's only so much room, after all.