In a post to his site just before the new year Patrick Louys shared some of his thoughts about how to become a better developer in 2018 as a sort of programming-related New Year's resolution.

Do you have any programming related New Year’s resolutions? A lot of people don’t follow through with their resolutions. But don’t let that discourage you. When you make resolutions, you are much more likely to achieve your goals (10x more).

I wrote this post to show you how you can achieve your programming New Year’s resolutions. Every year I have been writing down my goals, for over a decade. It helped me grow a lot in my personal and professional life. It’s not just about setting goals and achieving them. You have to pick the right goals.

He begins by making a few recommendations when it comes to setting goals and how to set yourself up in your day to day work to achieve them. He then relates this back to programming goals, suggestion you focus more on patterns and practices rather than specific technologies (unless they're relevant to your work). He also recommends several books to read during 2018 to either learn new concepts if you're just starting out or wanting to refine your own skills.

If you've ever looked at getting your ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) certification but didn't know where to start, Lorna Mitchell suggests that 2013 is the year to do it and offers some tips (and her own guide to help you along the way).

A few people have told me it's their New Year's resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I'd make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won't be taking a whole preparation course.

She recommends a few things in general too like studying up with the free Zend PHP 5.3 ZCE guide, research into areas that might be a bit foreign to you and, of you have the time and means, try taking a course to walk you through what you'll need to know

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

As a New Year's gift to the PHP community, Paul Jones has created some benchmarks for some of the popular PHP frameworks, comparing the basic functionality of creating a page in each.

As such, I have prepared a new set of benchmarks for Cake, Solar, Symfony, and Zend Framework using an almost identical methodology as last time.

The last time is a set of previous benchmarks he ran to test the response times for each of the four frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework.

The stats have changed a little from the previous results, but overall it's pretty similar - the latest version of each of them shows Solar coming out on top and Symfony as the slowest in its "limitation of responsiveness in a dynamic environment". You can download the log files and the complete report of the tests here.

UPDATE: Paul has also made the code for the benchmark project available to the public on a Google project - http://code.google.com/p/web-framework-benchmarks/.

As a New Year's gift to the PHP community, Paul Jones has created some benchmarks for some of the popular PHP frameworks, comparing the basic functionality of creating a page in each.

As such, I have prepared a new set of benchmarks for Cake, Solar, Symfony, and Zend Framework using an almost identical methodology as last time.

The last time is a set of previous benchmarks he ran to test the response times for each of the four frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework.

The stats have changed a little from the previous results, but overall it's pretty similar - the latest version of each of them shows Solar coming out on top and Symfony as the slowest in its "limitation of responsiveness in a dynamic environment". You can download the log files and the complete report of the tests here.

UPDATE: Paul has also made the code for the benchmark project available to the public on a Google project - http://code.google.com/p/web-framework-benchmarks/.