In a recent post to his site Eduards Sizvos shares an opinion that's believed by many in the development world: stop learning frameworks.

We are developers. We need to stay up to date with technology. Every day, we learn programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. The more modern tools we know?—?the better.

Keeping up to date with Angular, React, Vue, Riot, Ember, Knockout is fun.

But we are wasting our time.

He goes on to talk about time, how important it is to spend on the right things and offers a story of his own where learning specific technologies didn't help in the long run. He then shares some resources (books) to help you learn good concepts instead of specific tools.

Remember – frameworks, libraries and tools come and go. Time is precious. Invest your golden time in transferable skills. Skills that will always be relevant.

Vladimir Goncharov has a tutorial posted to his Medium.com site showing how to integrate machine learning and computer vision into a PHP application using the opencv library. The php-opencv library is a C-level implementation (via an extension) making it easer to use it directly from PHP.

Now, “Machine learning” is developing very fast, it has already written a lot of articles, including the ones on the medium, and almost every developer would like to start using it in their work tasks and home projects, but where to start and what to use is not always understandable. Most articles for beginners offer a bunch of literature, on the reading of which there is not enough life, “inexpensive” courses, etc.

[...] I was considering writing a php-opencv module by myself using SWIG and spent a lot of time on it, but I did not achieve anything. [...] Then I found the library of php-opencv on the github space, it is a module for php7, which makes calls to opencv methods.

He then starts in on the code making use of the library to read in images, perform face detection, facial recognition, and locating facial marks/landmarks. He also includes a section covering the use of neural networks to improve the quality of images, classify them and the use of Tensorflow models to detect certain kinds of objects. The post ends with a look at getting the requirements installed to use the tool and links to other examples.

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to analyze tweet sentiments using a combination of PHP and machine learning (with the help of the php-ai/php-ml library).

As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. [...] Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we’ll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.

The post then starts in with some of the basics of machine learning and sentiment analysis and briefly introduces the php-ml library and what functionality it offers. It then outlines the problem they're trying to solve and the solution including what data points php-ml will use to determine the sentiment of a tweet. The author shows how to get the php-ml package installed, how to read in the data set and how to "exercise" the sentiment analysis against the tweets. It describes how the evaluation works and shows the accuracy result of a basic run.

On the Laravel News site there's a post about a new resource for learning more about Laravel and how the framework really works: Diving Laravel.

Mohamed Said, creator of the Laravel Forge SDK, Laravel Language Manager, and more has launched a new learning resource called Diving Laravel. [...] The site currently has the following topics, and more will be added in the future: The Exception Handler, The Task Scheduler, Package Auto Discovery, The Notifications System, and Diving Redis.

The site breaks each of the components down into "dives" with smaller tutorials covering different aspects in each. All of the content is free for anyone that wishes to get a more in-depth look at what happens under the covers when Laravel handles your code.

For those out there wanting to learn more about the Laravel framework but weren't sure where to start, the Laravel News site has just the post for you. In this new guide they provide seven steps to help you learn about Laravel and its use more effectively.

As the community grows, there are many resources available to help you learn Laravel. That’s great! But, how do you choose the best one? Which will be the best use of your time to read or watch? For those new to the framework, I’m sure these questions are on your mind, here are seven tips to help you learn Laravel more effectively.

Some of these tips will be specific to Laravel, while others are more general for learning any programming language or framework.

Their steps start with some of the more foundational stuff like learning about Composer/OOP/PHP first before venturing into the framework at all. Then, with that knowledge under your belt, you can move on to the other steps: where to learn the most effectively (books, courses, videos, etc) and actually putting fingers to keys and start writing code. He makes recommendations about how to use Google and Stack Overflow to help you find what you need an, finally, the advice to find a mentor to learn from and to not give up even if you hit something difficult.

In this new post to his site Robert Basic has shared some interesting (personal) insights about what he's learned over the last four years as a developer on a project.

Since yesterday was my last day on a project after four years and two months, I decided to take a look back on those four years and write down some of the things I learned.

Things I learned about being a better listener, a better communicator, a better team mate, a better programmer.

He shares his own personal experience around six different points, all good things to keep in mind for any developer out there:

• Leave your ego at the door
• Don’t play the blame game
• Take responsibility
• It’s OK to say I don’t know
• Knowing the business domain is important
• Ask why?

He ends the post by looking forward to the future and what the next challenge will bring for he and his team.

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.

A new service has launched in an effort to help teach PHP to those looking to learn in a different sort of way. The phpschool.io site provides you with a series of exercises that walk you through both the fundamentals of the language and a few more complex topics.

PHP School is a set of ever expanding workshops to teach you basic to advanced concepts in PHP. We launch with one workshop: Learn You PHP. [...] Each exercise increases in difficulty, guiding you through the core concepts of PHP.

Currently the tutorials cover topics like "My First IO", separation of concerns, working with exceptions and handling dependencies. The installation of the lessons is as simple as making a composer require call and installing the packages and dependencies required by the tool. They're also actively looking for community contributions to add more workshops to the based on the Learn You PHP package currently included. The training was inspired by what NodeSchool provides for the Node.js language.

On the Dutch Web Alliance site today Stefan Koopmanschap makes a recommendation about something that can help make you a better developer and grow in your knowledge: continuous learning.

Education. In a fast-changing environment such as the web industry, education is the single most important thing to survive. [...] We need to stay up-to-date on those subjects to ensure we keep doing the right things in the right ways. It is impossible to keep your knowledge on everything up-to-date and still have enough time to work, so we need to make choices on which topics to focus on and how to learn. In this article I’ll go into some strategies and some ways to keep the knowledge of you and your team current.

He covers lots of good topics, including a brief summary of each point as he goes (including deciding if you want to be a generalist or specialist). He goes through several places to gain this kind of knowledge including:

• Knowledge sessions
• Trainings
• Code kata
• Code reviews
• Mentoring

...and these are just some of the places. He also points out the value of learning something on your own every day, trying out something outside of your usual solutions and remembering that "no two challenges are the same".

The Run Geek Radio podcast, hosted by PHP community member Adam Culp, has posted its latest episode - Episode 099: Crawling Before We Can Walk.

So many startups attempt to skip the crawling stages and the MPV (minimum viable product) as they push to become successful. Just as many developers attempt to skip the vital stages of learning and forge ahead to create bugs, security holes, and poor code. Adam Culp, the host of Run Geek Radio, talks about how important it is to crawl before we can walk.

He also talks about the ZendCon and Sunshine PHP conferences (he's an organizer for both) and an update on some of his own personal speaking and running happenings. You can listen to this latest episode using either the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show. You can also subscribe to the feed to get info about future episodes as they're released.