On the Laravel News site there's an interesting post about learning "just in time" so you can not only keep up with the latest knowledge but not have to worry about things you don't actually need to know.

Technology—including the web—moves insanely fast. It can be intimidating (often annoyingly so) to try to not only consume the content constantly served to us, but also retain it. After all, isn’t the point of sharing information to learn from it? This just-in-time knowledge can be an unfriendly reminder that, no matter how hard we try, we will have a difficult time keeping up with the newest trends and tech.

[...] Luckily in tech, most of us have to keep up to date on software and hardware to be successful at work. But what if we’re swimming in a project at work and don’t have time to look into the new technologies? What if it’s nearly impossible to bake new knowledge into our jobs?

The article talks about methods for "knowledge gathering" you can do in small bites during your day, making use of them to keep up with the latest trends and technology. It also talks about retention, how sleep and training play into it and the where researching topics more in-depth can help.

On the JetBrains site there's a recent post showing you how to use just-in-time debugging and breakpoints in their PHPStorm IDE combined with the popular PHP debugging tool Xdebug.

In every project comes a moment where code stabilizes and we don’t want to keep the debugger attached to our code all the time. Or maybe we just want to run our code and only attach the debugger when an error occurs or an exception is thrown. Meet Xdebug’s just-in-time (jit) mode and PHP Exception Breakpoints in PhpStorm!

This feature makes use of the "jit" setting for the "remote_mode" setting that Xdebug offers to only send debugging information back to the remote debugger with an error occurs. They show you how to set up PHPStorm for these debugger connections and some example screenshots of it in action. The breakpoints feature compliments this functionality by allowing you to set breakpoints on which kind of errors you want to see information about (ex. warning, notice or deprecated issues).

On the HHVM (HipHop Virtal Machine) blog there's a new post that looks at the evolution of the HHVM JIT compiler since the project started about four years ago.

When the hhvm project was started almost 4 years ago, it had a two-part mandate: First, create a PHP JIT that could serve facebook.com at least as efficiently as hphpc, the PHP execution engine we were using at the time. Second, replace hphpi, the interpreter our PHP developers were using in their daily work. hphpc and hphpi were independent pieces of software with unintentional subtle differences in behavior and a significant maintenance burden. Unifying the execution engines used in production and development would make our jobs easier while giving the PHP devs a nicer experience at the same time.

The article goes on to talk about their needs from the environment and the basics of how the JIT compiler works to "translate" the code into something more low level than even C++. They chart out the performance of the HHVM versus the HPPC, showing a major growth around the end of the last year and continuing into this year. They also give an example of how this translation happens from a PHP script to bytecode to the translated result from their "TranslatorX64" tool.

On PHPClasses.org today the latest episode (#19) of the "Lately in PHP" podcast has been posted. In it Manual Lemos and Ernani Joppert: talk about the concept of a JIT (just in time) compiler for PHP (such as HipHop or Phalanger).

JIT compilation is the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.

The hosts and their guests talk about compiling PHP, things that happened in 2011 and look forward to what's to come in the world of PHP in 2012. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to the podcast feed.