On his site Tomas Votruba has a post sharing one thing he thinks is holding back your company from doing well: not open sourcing code.

Do you want to hire developers? Do you want to hire those developers who help your company in the long term? Do you want to save money for random picks of HR agencies? Do you want to hire developers who already know your code before even meeting you? Do you want to attract developers in the long term with zero investment?

Go Open-source!

He goes on to talk about some of his own experiences in the job interview process and how "old-school methods" aren't working as well as they used to. He then makes some suggestions about how to attract programmers "in a 2018 way". He uses a comparison between the traditional hiring process and a newer one ("open hiring"). He makes the suggestion of, when looking to fill a role, going to the contributors list of your or other popular packages and see who has contributed and reach out to them first. This allows you a preview into their skills and lets you evaluate it (and other contributions) against your needs for the role.

Ondrej Mirtes has offered some advice in this Medium.com post sharing some of his experience in the development and management of his PHPStan project (static analysis for bug detection).

Most developers have side projects. That's how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn't actually bring the masses to his doorstep.

At the beginning of last December, I released PHPStan? - ?static analysis tool for PHP that focuses on finding bugs. The project gained a lot of traction resulting in currently over 1 300 stars on GitHub and more than 30 000 downloads on Packagist.

He spends the rest of the article sharing the things he did to make sure that the project "didn't end up in the dustbin of history" and be successful. Topics include:

• Build the hard stuff first
• Serve market needs
• Promotion
• Ask for money

He ends with what he sees as the most important part of any good open source project - as a maintainer you need to "be nice". This means being responsive to incoming feedback, keeping in mind that people contribute/comment because they care about the project (and it's not usually about you).

The Run Geek Radio podcast, with host and PHP community member Adam Culp, has released its latest episode - Episode 003 – OpenWest Namebadges, Overtraining, Developer Salary and Freelance Rates, Saving Money.

Adam Culp talks about the awesome namebadges at the OpenWest conference, and how assembly was required using a soldering iron. Then shares symptoms, causes, and treatment for over-training while running. (mentions Tension Tamer tea, but intended to speak about Sleepy Time tea instead) Following this the subject of developers and money was covered. What should developers charge per hour, what should a freelance developer pay themselves, and what should developers do to save money for a rainy day.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show. If you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe to the feed too for more shows in the future.

On the Agile Toolkit blog today there's and interesting article with a slightly misleading title - "How to Earn Money with Open Source?" It talks less about strategies of how to monetize your open source project and more about how other projects are doing it and why a good core team is important.

OpenSource is an amazing phenomena, but how safe open-source projects are? Would commercial project be safer over the community-supported project? Frameworks can't exist without their core team and In this article I look at how different PHP frameworks are supporting their core developers.

He talks briefly about the need for a good, solid group of core developers on a framework (or really any product) to provide a stable foundation if a product was created with it. Four projects are mentioned - Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Agile Toolkit - and why, because of the backing they have from a company and a large group of developers (and contributors) they're not "yet another framework" that'll disappear over time.

Making new frameworks is fun, however, if you share framework with others, be responsible about the support. Make realistic goals and try to have a plan for a next few years. If you are the author, think who will support the community when you decide to move on.

To help "sweeten the deal" a bit and encourage you to give towards the causes that the PHP Women are trying to accomplish, they're offering a special little bonus for those who donate at a certain level:

Cal Evans from the Zend DevZone - being the awesome guy that he is - has graciously offered to mail out to the first 10 people who donate to PHPWomen $50 or more, a PHP elePHPant. Yep - you get one of the hard to find and much sought after plushy PHP elePHPants.

You can find out more about the goals for their fund raising in this other post to the PHPWomen.org blog as well as information on submitting whatever you feel like donating (time or money).

On his blog today, Zak Greant points out the talk that Rasmus Lerdorf has given at this year's OSCON - "How to Make Money with PHP", complete with a link to slides.

Rasmus is presenting his "How to Make Money with PHP" session for the Portland PHP User group, OSCON attendees and OSCAMP attendees. This session is one of my favorite Rasmus talks - the concepts that he teaches are key to helping PHP developers move from being frustrated novices to being happy and productive PHP hackers.

Some of the key things that the session covers are how to find bottlenecks in your PHP application, how to plan for capacity and (of course) how to make huge amounts of money with PHP.

As mentioned, here's the link for the slides. It looses a bit when it's not being presented right there in front of you, but the 23 slides provide more than enough information to keep one busy for a while.

On his blog today, Zak Greant points out the talk that Rasmus Lerdorf has given at this year's OSCON - "How to Make Money with PHP", complete with a link to slides.

Rasmus is presenting his "How to Make Money with PHP" session for the Portland PHP User group, OSCON attendees and OSCAMP attendees. This session is one of my favorite Rasmus talks - the concepts that he teaches are key to helping PHP developers move from being frustrated novices to being happy and productive PHP hackers.

Some of the key things that the session covers are how to find bottlenecks in your PHP application, how to plan for capacity and (of course) how to make huge amounts of money with PHP.

As mentioned, here's the link for the slides. It looses a bit when it's not being presented right there in front of you, but the 23 slides provide more than enough information to keep one busy for a while.