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.

In two new posts to his site Stanislav Malyshev takes a look both forward and back at the PHP language, where it came from in the 5.4 version and ahead into the just released 5.6 version discussing the good, bad and road ahead.

With 5.6.0 having been released and 5.4 branch nearing its well-earned retirement in security-fixes-only status I decided to try and revive this blog. As the last post before the long hiatus was about the release of the 5.4, I think it makes sense to look back and see how 5.4 has been doing so far.

Having taken a look in the past, now it’s time to look into the future, namely 5.6 (PHP 7 is the future future, we’ll get there eventually). So I’d like to make some predictions of what would work well and not so well and then see if it would make sense in two years or turn out completely wrong.

In the look back at 5.4 he talks about some of the good (the release process, $this in closures) and some of the "not so good" including traits and the overall adoption rate. He also includes a few "don't know" items such as the overall performance and the inclusion of the mysqlnd driver. In the look forward he talks about the impact of things like constant expressions, phpdbg and function/constant importing (for better or for worse). He also briefly mentions two hurdles to the adoption of 5.6: OpenSSL becoming more strict and the overall adoption rate.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos looking back at 2010 an the life of PHP - yet another great year.

2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers. This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

Among the important happenings of this past year he mentions the issues surrounding PHP6, HipHop and PHP running on the Andriod platform. He speculates on a few things that we can expect from PHP in the upcoming year(s) like the release of PHP 5.4. Also included are some updates that were made to the PHPClasses.org site itself.

With 2009 over, it gives us a chance to look back at the previous year and at some the good things that happened and at how the PHP community as a whole grew and shifted dramatically during the year.

First I'll start with some of our own statistics - we had over 2100 news stories added during 2009 with over 80 job postings, 330+ mentioning the Zend Framework and, yes, even about 80 mentioning "the cloud". We also blew past our ten thousandth post mark and are already up into the 13k range!

The PHP community saw some of the usual happenings - the conferences like php|tek, the Dutch PHP Conference and the TestFest - but there were also a few surprises like the CodeWorks touring conference and the coining of the term "funemployment" to define the large group of PHP community members making changes in their jobs.

This year also saw the release of one of the most important versions of PHP in a good while - PHP 5.3. This update included a lot of what had been previously predicted in PHP6 and wrapped it all up in a nice little package. There was also a renewed interesting in code quality, metrics, unit testing and code deployment. It wasn't just about the code anymore, it became more about the ecosystem it lives in.

The community itself also saw a big change and a broadening of scope. Frameworks were no longer seen as a novelty and started to take root and really be the foundations that applications were built on. The community accepted this and other great tools as essential to their development. On the whole, the PHP community really matured this past year - PHP has come up from being the plucky little language that could and has grown into an enterprise-level (and very capable) language that is flexible enough to not only contend with "the big boy languages" out there, but has also been known to give several companies a leg up. The community has been there to respond and several sources are predicting that the demand for good PHP developers in 2010 will be high.

Community Thoughts:

• Lorna Mitchell
• Matthew Turland
• Rob Allen
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Davey Shafik
• John Martic
• the Echolibre blog
• Keith Casey
• Ivo Jansch (on the Ibuildings blog)
• Ligaya Turmelle

PHP was a great year for the PHP community and had both his high moments and its lows (just like any other community on the web) so, in lieu of our usual monthly recap type of year en post, we present a summary of some of the things that happened this past year:

2007 Gave us:

• Plenty to talk about on namespaces
• GoPHP5
• EMFs (Even More Frameworks)
• the mysqlnd driver
• lots of new tutorials
• over 2,500 new PEAR and PECL package releases
• Several new PHP releases (5.2.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 5.2.2, 4.4.7, 5.2.3, 5.2.4 and 5.2.5)
• The End of Life for PHP 4
• The Month of PHP Bugs
• A move for PHP in the Enterprise
• a renewed effort for Unicode support
• releases from the major framework players like CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Solar
• IBM and Oracle working together with Zend
• Over 130 new job postings
• Increased interest in running PHP on Windows (FastCGI!)
• The creation of and episodes 1 through 30 of the Zend Developer Zone podcast PHP Abstract

Books:

• The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites
• PHP and MySQL by Example
• PHP Solutions
• PHP Programming with PEAR
• PHP in Action
• Pro Drupal Development
• The eZ Components Developers Handbook
• The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition)
• Learning PHP Data Objects
• Enterprise PHP Development (announced)

Conferences:

• 5th Annual eZ Conference
• Vancouver PHP Conference
• php|tek 2007
• Dutch PHP Conference
• SymfonyCamp
• php|works 2007
• Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2007 (including the Unconference)
• DC PHP Conference 2007
• PHP London 2007 Conference

I know there's stuff out there that I've missed, so comment away and let the community know! (I might come back and link all of these things later on)

PHP was a great year for the PHP community and had both his high moments and its lows (just like any other community on the web) so, in lieu of our usual monthly recap type of year en post, we present a summary of some of the things that happened this past year:

2007 Gave us:

• Plenty to talk about on namespaces
• GoPHP5
• EMFs (Even More Frameworks)
• the mysqlnd driver
• lots of new tutorials
• over 2,500 new PEAR and PECL package releases
• Several new PHP releases (5.2.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 5.2.2, 4.4.7, 5.2.3, 5.2.4 and 5.2.5)
• The End of Life for PHP 4
• The Month of PHP Bugs
• A move for PHP in the Enterprise
• a renewed effort for Unicode support
• releases from the major framework players like CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Solar
• IBM and Oracle working together with Zend
• Over 130 new job postings
• Increased interest in running PHP on Windows (FastCGI!)
• The creation of and episodes 1 through 30 of the Zend Developer Zone podcast PHP Abstract

Books:

• The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites
• PHP and MySQL by Example
• PHP Solutions
• PHP Programming with PEAR
• PHP in Action
• Pro Drupal Development
• The eZ Components Developers Handbook
• The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition)
• Learning PHP Data Objects
• Enterprise PHP Development (announced)

Conferences:

• 5th Annual eZ Conference
• Vancouver PHP Conference
• php|tek 2007
• Dutch PHP Conference
• SymfonyCamp
• php|works 2007
• Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2007 (including the Unconference)
• DC PHP Conference 2007
• PHP London 2007 Conference

I know there's stuff out there that I've missed, so comment away and let the community know! (I might come back and link all of these things later on)

With the new year upon us, lots of PHP developers in the community have taken time to look back at this past year, both in their own lives and in the time they've spent in the community. Here's just a few:

• Nick Halsead
• Elizabeth Smith
• Matthew Turland
• Ivo Jansch
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Davey Shafik Matthew Weir O'Phinney

Stay tuned to this post for more contributions from the community as they are posted.

With the new year upon us, lots of PHP developers in the community have taken time to look back at this past year, both in their own lives and in the time they've spent in the community. Here's just a few:

• Nick Halsead
• Elizabeth Smith
• Matthew Turland
• Ivo Jansch
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Davey Shafik Matthew Weir O'Phinney

Stay tuned to this post for more contributions from the community as they are posted.

Those that didn't get a chance to check out this year's PHP UK Conference can get a little taste of what it was like from Rob Allen's perspective in his latest blog post today.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.

Those that didn't get a chance to check out this year's PHP UK Conference can get a little taste of what it was like from Rob Allen's perspective in his latest blog post today.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.