On the Laravel News site there's an article posted from Sharon Steed covering some habits of highly productive tech teams including topics like trust, meetings and understanding roles.

There’s always a lot of talk about “culture” on tech teams. And that makes sense: managers generally hire people that will fit in well with the group they’ve assembled because they know there’s more to work than just doing the job. Being able to get along with your coworkers, being reliable, and looking the part are also important. A big part of building a solid company culture is about creating an environment which helps your employees be productive. Unfortunately, a lot of what we do in tech has the opposite effect.

She talks about the role of perks in an effective workforce and how, despite some seeming very nice on the outside, can cause burnout as it encourages longer work hours than normal. From there she moves into some suggestions about "meeting culture" and some of the major drawbacks to meetings (including how they can distract from "real, paying work"). There's a nice flow chart included in the post too that can help you determine if a meeting is really necessary or not. From there she goes on to talk about the other two topics mentioned above - employees knowing and understanding their roles and fostering trust between them through things like delegation and effective listening.

In a new press release to their site, Zend teases at some of the results from their Zend Developer Pulse survey. In these results, they share what music developers prefer (according to the survey) for when they're developing.

The survey showed that as much as 86% of developers listen to music while coding. Of the major music genres, 42% of developers said they prefer coding to music of the rock/pop variety.

The results also included the top artists, some "guilty pleasure" choices and some of the least popular artists. The full results of this survey will be coming out in January 2012, giving a "developer perspective" on the current state of the industry, technology in general and their career.

In this new post to his blog today Stefan Koopmanschap reviews a book that, while not specifically PHP related, can help out just about anyone digging their hands into source code daily - "The Productive Programmer" (Neal Ford, O'Reilly).

So what is the book about? Basically, it is a programmer efficiency guide. It goes through several tools, pieces of software but also development approaches that will make your developer life easier and more efficient.

He goes on to talk about the two main sections of the book - Mechanics and Practice - and what's contained in each. Stefan also points out a few things that he learned as he went through the book including a strong push for automation, how some of the ancient philosophies still apply to development today and the motivation to question how things "have always been done" to look for a better way.

Nick Halstead asks an interesting question on his blog today - "Do faster typists make better coders?"

I have been able to touch type since about age 12 and can manage about 100 words per minute when faced with blocks of text to copy and even faster if I am just writing code. [...] Programming in C meant a lot more typing of parenthesis and a lot more thinking about the structure of the code.

PHP has introduced another set of typing problems with a lot more use of < > and a much higher mixture of variables/functions/parenthesis plus the added bonus of trying to remember a single function from a choice of 3000+.

Several of the comments on the post suggest that it could be helpful to productivity, but shouldn't be focused on too much. After all, what really matters is the programmers skill, right?

Nick Halstead asks an interesting question on his blog today - "Do faster typists make better coders?"

I have been able to touch type since about age 12 and can manage about 100 words per minute when faced with blocks of text to copy and even faster if I am just writing code. [...] Programming in C meant a lot more typing of parenthesis and a lot more thinking about the structure of the code.

PHP has introduced another set of typing problems with a lot more use of < > and a much higher mixture of variables/functions/parenthesis plus the added bonus of trying to remember a single function from a choice of 3000+.

Several of the comments on the post suggest that it could be helpful to productivity, but shouldn't be focused on too much. After all, what really matters is the programmers skill, right?