Stefan Koopmanschap has shared a rant about best practices in a new post to his site. In it he shares some of his thoughts as presented in a lightning talk at the PHPAmersfoort meetup.

I have yet to talk to a developer that has told me that they were purposefully writing bad software. I think this is something that is part of being a developer, that you write software that is as good as you can possibly make it within the constraints that you have.

In our effort to write the Best Software Ever (TM) we read up on all the programming best practices: design patterns, refactoring and rewriting code, new concepts such as Domain-Driven Design and CQRS, all the latest frameworks and of course we test our code until we have a decent code coverage and we sit together with our teammates to do pair programming. And that's great. It is. But it isn't.

In the post he touches on a few main topics with his ideas for each:

• Test Coverage
• Domain-driven design
• Frameworks
• Event sourcing + CQRS
• Pair programming
• Refactoring + Rewriting

He ends the post with a suggestion to "consider all the best practices" when writing your code and developing applications. It's not just about applying them because they're defined as "best practices", it's about determining which of these practices make sense for your situation.

That Podcast, hosted by PHP community members Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall has posted their latest episode - Episode #5, "The One Where Everyone is Going to London".

Beau and Dave discuss having been selected to Symfony Live London and how they plan to bring their families with them so everyone can hang out in person for the first time. Beau discusses his other upcoming talks including Nomad PHP EU and php[world] and Dave talks a bit about his pair programming setup. Both agree that rewriting code from another project is a great way to really understand how the thing ticks.

There's a wide variety of topics discussed in this episode including:

• SymfonyLive London 2014
• Nomad PHP: Composer: Stability and Semantic Versioning Demystified (presented by Beau)
• FoxCitiesPHP
• Links to several repositories, tools and articles discussing design patterns

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading it directly.