On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a tutorial about the Theory of Constraints, how it can be related back to PHP and what it means for building effective code.

I had been reading The Phoenix Project, a great novel about IT (you read that right), which presents day to day IT and devops problems at a large Amazon-like company in a way which makes mortals understand the complexities and chaos of 21st century technology.

Without giving away any spoilers, at one point in the book the Theory of Constraints is mentioned. [...] The Theory of Constraints can be distilled to the idea that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In the book it was phrased thusly: "Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion." For some reason, this resonated with me much more than the chain idiom. There’s just something about building something that’s ineffective that’s more relatable to me than breaking something that’s weakly built.

He goes on to talk about the subject of "factories" and "browsers", relating work done (or not done) on browsers to a factory where throughput of work isn't optimized. He then applies this back to PHP, mentioning some of the tools that can help optimize your workflow to prevent the same kind of factory backlog. This list includes services like Blackfire, XDebug and MySQL optimization techniques.

On the Tighten blog there's an interview posted with some of the speakers from the recent Laracon Online conference that included Jeffrey Way, Evan You, Jason McCreary and Taylor Otwell.

Wednesday was the inaugural Laracon Online, an online conference devoted to bringing great Laravel teaching to folks who may not be able to attend an in-person conference. Tighten co-founder Matt Stauffer spoke on Laravel's service container, along with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel; Jeffrey Way, creator of Laracasts; Adam Wathan, Tighten alum; and several more excellent speakers.

During the session, conference attendees asked questions for the speakers to answer after their talks were over. However, the Slack channel was a fast-paced mix of conversations and Q&A, so we wanted to aggregate the Q&A sessions that did happen together in a single place.

The interview consolidates the questions asked of each of the eight speakers including in some cases links to the resources mentioned.

On the Zend blog they've posted an article where Zend's own Cal Evans shares the answers to some of the questions he received from a "unit testing for product managers" webinar.

Thanks to everyone that joined our Unit testing for project managers webinar yesterday. It was great to see so many people engaged and asking questions. I’ve pulled together answers for your questions we didn’t get to on the webcast. If you have more questions, leave a comment below!

If you missed the webinar or want to re-watch it, the on-demand version is now available. The slides are also posted on Slideshare.

The questions he answers touch on topics that include:

• property-based testing
• testing on an existing project (medium or large)
• integration vs unit testing

The final answer covers something shared at the end of the presentation, the resolution to "just do it". Cal backs that statement up with some additional detail and puts it in the mindset of a project manager.

PHP community member Cal Evans recently talked with Jessica Rose, a well-known speaker at technology conferences all about public speaking and some of her own thoughts and advice to potential speakers.

This week my guest is Jessica Rose. Jessica speaks at developers events all over Europe and the US.

She took time out from her busy schedule to join me to answer questions on public speaking. We talk abut her first talk, preparing for talks, speaking to audiences whose first language is not English, and so much more.

Their conversation was recorded as a live Google Hangout and can be viewed either through the in-page video player or by heading over to YouTube.

For those interested in how things work "behind the scenes" at technology conferences and how it looks from an organizer's perspective, Cal Evans has put together a video to share his own experiences.

My good friend Adam (@adamculp) and I spent a few minutes answering questions about how talks are selected in a [Call for Papers]. If you’ve ever wondered, about the process, give it a listen.

The recording was of a live Google Hangouts session they did a while back answering both some of the common questions people have and questions from their viewers. They talk about the Call for Papers process, how they've selected talks in the past and the role that passion plays. There's also discussion about speaker experience, diversity and how to find out the interest level of you topic. There's plenty more mentioned in the video as well, so if you're considering submitting to a technology conference be sure to give it a listen (well, watch...it is a video after all).

The main php.net site has officially posted the latest release candidate version for the upcoming PHP 7 version: Release Candidate 4. It's now available for download and testing.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 4. This is the ninth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system. [...] PHP 7.0.0 RC 4 contains fixes for 22 reported bugs and over 100 commits with various improvements.

As always, you can download this latest pre-release version for testing from the QA downloads page or windows.php.net/qa for the Windows binaries. If you're interested in the full list of changes, check out the NEWS file for updates.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the first part of a new series of articles showing you how to use (and secure) Jenkins, the popular continuous integration tool, to bring more quality to your PHP-based applications.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about PHP-CI, which you can use as a continuous integration tool for your PHP projects. Within this article I indicated I still liked Jenkins the most as a CI tool. Time to dive into Jenkins and see how we can set this up for our PHP project.

In this first part of the series helps you get Jenkins installed via a package and configure it on the server. He then gets into the steps to secure the installation: configuring users, turning off signups and the type of security to set up (they choose matrix-based). He wraps up the article with a look at installing some useful plugins and using a template to use as a base for setting up your projects.

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode with guest Justin DeLucia. In this new episode they try out something different - a full, dedicated Q&A episode.

This week we have good friend of the show Justin DeLucia on to help host our first dedicated Q&A episode. Not only that, but Fraser is back! along with some crazy adventures that he discusses since his last time on the show. We have been fortunate to receive many questions throughout the past couple of weeks, and thought it would be good to release the answers as a dedicated show. Topics discussed include, breaking into the industry, the PDO vs. Mysqli debate, bespoke vs. off-the-shelf CMS debate and what to consider when building a Web API.

Other topics mentioned in this latest episode include: the Doctrine project, mutual recursion, Laravel Forge and Phil Sturgeon's book Build APIs You Won't Hate. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, consider subscribing to their feed too.

In a new post to his site Volker Dusch shares his thoughts about warnings in coding style checks (and how they differ from real errors).

When it comes to coding standards there is one rule that always makes me cringe when I stumble upon it: "Lines SHOULD be less than 120 chars long. If not a warning will be issued." Let me try to make a point why I consider WARNINGS in coding guideline checks hurtful.

He defines a warning first, so there's no confusion (something that should be done, but doesn't have to) and why he thinks there's not much of a place for them in the code guidelines. He suggests that, by having them, they take away time from the real issues, the errors. He notes that "should" rules on formatting shouldn't be added to your QA tools right away. Adding too many of these that spit out too many warnings (not errors) could just muddy the waters and make the developers more confused.

The PHP.net has announced the availability of the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 5.4.0 series - PHP 5.4.0 RC6:

The PHP development team announces the 6th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] The 6th release candidate focused on improving traits. Please test them carefully and help us to identify bugs in order to ensure that the release is solid and all things behave as expected.

You can download this latest release from the PHP QA site (Windows binaries) and test it on your local instance/applications. Any and all feedback about issues should be reported to either the QA mailing list or on the bug tracker. A complete list of updates is available in the NEWS file.