On his Medium.com site Benoit Schneider (CTO of Outsourcify) has a post sharing some of the reasons they made the choice to use Symfony for their web development needs.

At Outsourcify we work on projects of varying sizes, from small sites with a few pages to complex business applications. Depending on the case, we recommend different technical solutions (we do a lot of Javascript SPA and Wordpress also), but for the most complex cases, when we have to chose a technology to build large web applications that require several weeks or months of work for several web developers, Symfony is our framework of choice.

He starts with a bit of background on his own experiences with Symfony and why he chose it for his own needs early on. He then shares his thoughts around "why Symfony?" when there are many other major frameworks to choose from. He wraps up the post with a summary of some technical reasons to use the framework including the innovation it brings to the table and the robust ecosystem around it (and related products/tools).

Leonid Mamchenkov has a post on his site that points out a great resource for all of the podcast fans out there, the Awesome podcasts list.

Awesome podcasts is a curated list of podcasts for software engineers. The list includes a whole lot of sections – one for each programming language out there, generic software engineering, tools, etc.

The list is broken down into sections for various programming languages and technologies such as C++, Git, Python, PHP, Java and Rust. There's also sections for different topics not covered by specific technology such as security, general web development and community/inspirational topics. The list is a GitHub repository so if you have a favorite podcast that's not already on the list, be sure to send in a pull request to get it added.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to his site sharing a list of podcasts he enjoys and thought you might too.

I had sitting in travel not being able to do anything. Listening to music can help, but can end up also being frustrating. While I was working at Schiphol last year I got pointed to podcasts. Since then I've been really getting into listening to podcasts on my daily commute and it's been making the trip a lot more fun... and useful.

Here is a random collection of podcasts that I've been listening to in the past year and a half, on many different subjects. My main problem right now is that it's so many that I'm way behind on the episodes of most of these. Ah well, it's still quite good content.

Technology-related shows in the list include /dev/hell, Sound of Symfony and Voices of the ElePHPant. Others relate to topics like "justice, true crime, wrongful convictions etc", video games and a few Dutch language technology podcasts.

The SitePoint PHP blog has made an update to their "Being a Full Stack Developer" article covering what it means to be "full stack" and various technologies that can be used (or skills to learn) to get there.

A full stack developer who can get from a prototype to full MVP (minimum viable product) is often considered a jack of all trades, master of none, and with good reason. To define the modern full stack developer, we first need to focus on what the full stack developer used to be.

The article talks about what it use to mean (back around the early 2000s) to be "full stack" and some of the things they needed to know. He then goes through the things you'll need to know now to be considered basically on the same level:

• [Basic] Server Admin / Devops
• Cloud [Services]
• Back End [Development]
• Front End [Development]
• Design
• Logging
• Mobile

He ends the post by answering the question "is it worth it" to be a full stack developer versus focused on one thing, basically boiling down to two things. First, that most devs aren't actually full stack (even if they say they are) and that it can help to have this experience to, at the least, be able to approach a wide range of projects easier.

If you've ever been interested in starting a technology-centric meetup in your area but haven't known where to start, Jef Claes has some helpful hints to help you get started.

I've organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start.

He breaks down the recommendations into a list of ten things to do to make a successful meetup happen:

• Contacting a speaker
• Gathering speaker requirements
• Selecting a location sponsor
• Contacting a location sponsor
• Meetup.com
• Speaker gift
• Recordings
• Day of the meetup
• Give thanks

While ten steps sounds like a lot, some of these are optional (like the speaker gift) but they can help to build a good reputation for the group and make it easier to find future speakers.

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.

On the Laravel News site there's a new article posted by Percy Mamedy posing the question: "Can Frameworks lead to tribalism among developers?"

In the modern world of web development, it is common practice to make use of frameworks for building large scale applications instead of starting from scratch. [...] In the PHP world, we have seen the emergence of hundreds of frameworks thanks to a large and dedicated community. Some developers even develop their own framework re-using components and parts of other frameworks thanks to an awesome tool called composer.

[...] As part of an experiment, I wanted to see how my fellow developers would react and to what extent they were willing to go to defend their own frameworks if I praised Laravel as being the best framework out there. [...] As expected, responses were flowing in; some even brutal. Everyone defended their framework of choice with extreme passion and dedication. This has lead me to the conclusion that there is an intense sense of identity and kinship that developers have around their framework of choice.

His results came in from a post he made wondering how fellow developers would react to the statement "Google Trends says it all...Laravel is king." He talks about these results and the obviously relation to tribalism in technology choices and how it binds like people in groups, a common human need.

We all as developers feel this intense love and passion for our tools, it’s part of who we are, and I think it’s what makes our Job so unique; we code because we enjoy to and because we love to.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy K Powers, has released their latest episode today with guests Beth Tucker Long, Eyrn O'Neil and Samantha Quiñones - Episode #29: The Only Girl in the Room

Inspired by a panel discussion at Midwest PHP 2015, we discuss what barriers exist for women in the PHP community and what we can all do to remove gender bias.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page video player or directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get information about future episodes as they're released. You can also catch previous episodes by going to the main page of the site and scrolling through the "Past Episodes" section.

In a new post from the QaFoo blog they talk about a developer's life as a trade-off, the amount of work to put into one technology or approach before deciding it's not worth the trouble and moving on.

At Qafoo, we train a lot of people on topics like object oriented software design, automated testing and more. [...] There is no silver bullet and one of the most important skills every developer needs to hone is to assess possibilities and to find the best trade-off for the current challenge.

He uses personal experience to illustrate the point, a struggle they had with choosing a storage system for their application's data. While one technology seemed to be an ideal fit (Cassandra) the trouble it caused made them fall back to something more reliable. He also talks about another instance where he had to make a decision around using a state machine...or not, because of the overhead and time consumed around it.

One of the most important tasks of a developer is to make trade-offs. They occur wherever you look in your every day life. It is a highly important step to realize and accept this. And it is important to hone that skill. You need to open your mind for new technology and techniques, learn and try them wherever you can. But then you need to step back, analyze the current situation and then find the best trade-off between all possible approaches.

Adam Culp, well-known PHP community member and organizer of both the Sunshine PHP conference and ZendCon, has started up a new podcast that's targeted at blending the two things he enjoys most - geeky "stuff" and running.

My plans behind the podcast is to bring together two things I love to do…programming, and running. It only makes sense that I would want to share in both areas, and a podcast is a great way to do that. With the resurgence of podcasts lately I felt a little bit of peer pressure to attempt my own, and so far I have received wonderful reviews from PHP developers who also run, or runners who are also programmers.

You can find out more about the show over on rungeekradio.com or just tune in to the first episode and see what you think. This first show deals with conferences, user group talks and performance audit tools. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to the feed to get more episodes as they're released.