In a recent post to his site Sahand Saba has posted a list of nine anti-patterns every programmer should avoid. This list isn't language specific and ranges in types of advice from general programming practices down to more specific "code smells" to avoid. The code examples are in Python but you can interpolate them into the world of PHP pretty easily.

A healthy dose of self-criticism is fundamental to professional and personal growth. When it comes to programming, this sense of self-criticism requires the ability to detect unproductive or counter-productive patterns in designs, code, processes, and behaviour. This is why a knowledge of anti-patterns is very useful for any programmer. This article is a discussion of anti-patterns that I have found to be recurring, ordered roughly based on how often I have come across them, and how long it took to undo the damage they caused.

The list of nine includes things like:

• Premature Optimization
• God Class
• Inner-platform Effect
• Management by Numbers

Each item on the list includes a few subheadings talking about what it is, why it's bad, how to avoid it and some code examples (where appropriate) to find it in your code.

There's some major news from the Symfony project (with matching post on their blog) worth celebrating - the framework and project are celebrating nine years since the first commits were made by Fabien Potencier himself.

Where does the time go? This milestone reminds us all of how Symfony has become an important part of our professional lives and been changing the way we work with code for almost a decade! (We won’t even talk about the whole "we’re all getting older" thing!) [...] Over the last several years, the Symfony project has completely and continually reinvented itself. Originally a pure MVC framework with some auto-magical features, now it's both a set of decoupled components and a full-stack Request-Response framework backed by a vast development community.

They also talk some about the Symfony community and include a special thanks to all of the developers that have contributed their talents, both in code and documentation, to the framework over the years.

php|architect has posted the schedule for the exams happening at this year's php/db|works conference.

The examination schedule for the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam at php/db|works is now available from the conference website.

As always, the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam will be available to all attendees at no charge.

There are a total of nine testing periods over the four days of the conferece (including one on the Tutorials day). Seating is limited and it's on a first come, first serve basis for each of the day's tests. Be sure and sign up at the registration desk for your time.

php|architect has posted the schedule for the exams happening at this year's php/db|works conference.

The examination schedule for the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam at php/db|works is now available from the conference website.

As always, the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam will be available to all attendees at no charge.

There are a total of nine testing periods over the four days of the conferece (including one on the Tutorials day). Seating is limited and it's on a first come, first serve basis for each of the day's tests. Be sure and sign up at the registration desk for your time.