In a new post to his site Marco Pivetta talks about "visual debt" in your code. "Visual debt" is described in this video as the difficulty in understanding caused by complicated code.

Today we're talking about Visual debt in our code.

As an introduction, I suggest to watch this short tutorial about visual debt by @jeffrey_way. The concept is simple: let's take the example from Laracasts and re-visit the steps taken to remove visual debt.

The code example the post starts with, while a working piece of code, leans towards being more complex than necessary to complete the task. Marco spends the rest of the post walking you through the simplification of this code. He shows how to remove pieces that aren't as necessary, refactor it to remove the enforcement of contracts and some further things you can do to simplify the code.

He ends the post by saying that his suggestions are all sarcasm on his part and shouldn't be followed. By removing things like return type hinting and functionality that enforces good behavior you risk odd issues and poor usage down the line.

Cal Evans has posted a great tongue-in-cheek post to his blog today giving reasons why you shouldn't hire PHP community members to work at your company.

It is no secret that I spend a lot of time promoting the PHP Community. It is a vibrant, helpful and friendly community and I’ve said before that I believe it to be one of the most important asserts of the PHP language. I’m also a realist though; I’ve built teams and I’ve hired developers. [...] I have experience in this area and I have strong opinions. I am going to share one of those opinions with you right now: Don’t hire developers who are active members of the PHP Community.

His list of "don't hire" reasons are:

• PHP community members solve problems
• If they can’t solve a problem, they usually know who can
• They love to show off
• They make their employers look good at conferences.
• They work for free

For each topic, he gives a brief summary explaining its relation to the "don't hire" mentality. Reading between the lines, you'll see his true message, though - PHP community members have a lot to offer you and your business. Their visibility and experience (and connections) can only benefit the work they do.