The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has posted an episode recently talking about some of their own experiences at conferences, RFCs and an interview with special guest Phil Sturgeon.

This episode we are fortunate enough to have Phil Sturgeon back on the show. Originally recorded on the 11th Feb and only now being released (blame Edd), the show starts of with a comparison between Phil and Fraser's snowboarding injuries. We then move on to discuss standing desks, Sunshine PHP, American weather, and conference experiences. Following this DDD (Development Driven Development...) is touched upon, along with a look at the current stack Phil is using at work. Finally we chat about the 'attack-of-the-clone' packages Phil has noticed around the PHP community (ultra-tiny-small-restful frameworks etc.) and how far the 'The League of Extraordinary Packages' has grown.

They talk some about The League but also about other topics including the No Capes podcast, the PHP UK Conference, the domain-driven design community and scalar type hints. You can listen to this recent episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, consider subscribing to their feed too.

Rafael Dohms has posted some if his own thoughts to his site about The League of Extraordinary Packages and why he supports their efforts to bring a good solid base of curated packages to the PHP ecosystem.

“The League of Extraordinary Packages” is what I have dubbed a collective of composer packages. Its essentially a group of developers who have gathered under a single flag (or in this case a vendor name) and set standards for the packages that live there.

Why does this even matter? Well for one Packagist is an open repository, this means that it is wide open for anyone to join, from the best packages to the most ridiculous ones. Quality control is not one of its roles and quality checking is on average 2-3 clicks per package away.

He talks about the quality control measures The League has in place to only contain good, well-tested and solid PHP packages. He also lists a few of his main reasons for supporting the effort including the fact that it reduces author fragility and provides an extended reach for those packages to reach a wider audience.

I really enjoy the work being done by The League, or The PHPLeague, or Pleague as I prefer to call it. I think it has provided us with some very good packages and given us all something to strive for. Maybe more collectives is what we need.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing a video tutorial of how to use the Glide image handling library with your Laravel-based application.

Glide is a new package by Jonathan Reinink which is an on-demand image manipulation library. In this video he shows you how to set it up and the basic usage in Laravel 5.

In the tutorial Jonathan walks you through an introduction to the library and how it wraps around the Intervention image handling. He creates a basic application that, when an image endpoint is called, output the image with any given configuration options (like height and width). Glide is one of many packages making up The PHP League.