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.

On the Laravel Daily site there's a post that looks to answer a question often posed about any framework but, in this case, about Laravel - can Laravel be used for big enterprise apps?

Yesterday I’ve listened to a new Laravel Podcast episode with Taylor Otwell, Jeffrey Way and Matt Stauffer – and they (finally) talked about creating big apps with Laravel, lately this question is asked a lot by everyone. So is Laravel “fit” or “mature enough” for big projects? Since the podcast guys don’t provide a transcript, and listening to 50 minutes can be an overkill, I decided to write a summary, quoting the conversation and dividing the answers into more readable format like Q&A and bullet points, also relevant links. So, let’s dive in!

The post is then divided up into a few of the topics involved in Laravel being used for larger applications:

• What is a big app?
• So can Laravel be used for big apps?
• People are irrational
• Enterprise world
• Any examples of big Laravel apps?
• It’s not about the framework
• Ok, so how to build big apps?

For each point there's a comment from the episode with their own response (sometimes more than one, just depending on the subject).

On the Fortrabbit.com blog today they have a post where they share what they see as the 10 Pillars of PHP Development. It's a set of ten things they see as the most important to consider in a developer's work.

For most of us PHP developers writing applications now compared to ten or so years ago is quite a different endeavor. [...] This has changed in recent years. Classical web sites are becoming more and more the domain of specialized SaaS. [...] So web developers changed themselves by specializing and concentrating on what cannot be automated so easily: web applications. Along with this came a new mindset on how PHP development should be done and what tools should be used.

Their list of ten includes both generic topics (with a few subtopics for explanation) and specific technical items like:

• Code management
• Tests
• Dependencies and modularization
• Runtime data
• Deployment

Check out the rest of the post for other "pillars" in their list and explanations for each.

The Symfony blog has another in their "2014 Year in Review" series posted, this time with a focus on the London Symfony meetups and the presentations that were made.

2014 was a really successful year for the Symfony Meetup Group in London. I've been involved helping to organize these meetups for a few years now, but it was never a regular thing until this year. With a huge help of my SensioLabs UK colleagues we managed to bring the group to the next level. Each meetup we're getting around 60-90 attendees, which is a big improvement compared to the previous years. We also started recording the talks. Since the Symfony community in London is much bigger, I believe we can do even better in 2015!

Talks presented this year included:

• Optimizing Your Front End Workflow
• Applying Domain Driven Design with Symfony2 projects
• Silex saved me from my legacy code
• Scaling Symfony2 apps with RabbitMQ
• Speed up your Symfony2 application and build awesome features with Redis

Each topic has a summary, a link to the slides and a video of the presentation (if available).

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode today, another "ramblecast" of the hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann talking about a wide range of topics. This is episode #43.

Being without a guest this episode, gave us the excuse to ramble on about many different topics that have been on our minds for the past couple of weeks.

Topics included in the ramble are things like:

• WebSockets
• the Gulp workflow
• Active Record vs Data Mapper
• Test Driven Development
• the recent Apple keynote

You can listen to this latest episode either through their in page audio player or you can download the mp3 for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get this and other great episodes as they're released.

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has released their latest episode: Episode #27 - Ramble On. In it hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Ed Mann well...ramble on about various topics.

In this weeks show we decided to have a good ramble about a couple of topics that have cropped us this week. Ranging from freelance experiences, cheese-based Lorem Ipsum text, and famous Albert Einstein quotes. By the end we start to discuss our personal software deployment strategies, briefly touching on Docker, which will be the topic of next weeks show.

Topics included in their rambling are things like Docker, the Cloud 9 IDE and traits in PHP. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by just downloading the mp3 directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed if you like what you hear.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has posted some tips to helping you become a "PHP professional" and advance your skills and, potentially, your career in web application development.

When reading various PHP related blogs, Quora questions, Google+ communities, newsletters and magazines, I often notice extreme polarization of skill. Questions are either at the "How do I connect to a MySQL database?" level or something in the range of "How do I best scale my mailing system to send over one million emails per hour without introducing a new server?" I personally distinguish between 4 distinct levels of PHP prowess (likely applicable to any language/profession): beginner, intermediate, professional and elite.

He starts by looking at "the extremes" - the absolute beginners and the highly experienced professionals that have spent a lot of time "honing their skill". Somewhere in the middle are the intermediate developers. These are the ones he focuses on for the rest of the article, providing them with the knowledge and resource to advance. His recommendations include:

• Abandon spaghetti code
• Learn to set up your own PHP environment
• Exercise best practices early
• Read
• Find a buddy/mentor

There's a description for each one - and several more - with links to resources and other information to get more detail.

Ben Ramsey has a new post to his site where he reviews the "eras" of PHP that it's gone through in the past few years and ends up with what he calls the "Era of Testing" - the recent strong push that's being made to promote and encourage unit testing in PHP applications.

Over the past decade, the PHP community has progressed through a handful of distinct eras that have each been marked by a focus on specific best practices. This is most evident in the types of talks presented at conferences and user groups and in the articles published by php|architect magazine, PHPDeveloper.org, and the blogs of those whose feeds are distributed through Planet PHP. In thinking through this, I’ve come up with the following eras I think we, the PHP community, have had over the last ten years. These are in a general order, but eras overlap, and some have lasted longer than others, so there’s not a distinct beginning or end to each.

He briefly covers five different areas that PHP has evolved in over the past years: the shift to OOP, web application security, framework use, coding standards/organization and the push for better testing.

With the coming of the testing era, I’m seeing a lot of maturity in our community. The code we write is getting better. We’re following standards and best practices. We’re implementing a lot of good design principles. [...] I think the decade since PHP 5 was released has brought us to a great place as a community. [...] With each new era, we can’t forget what we’ve learned, though. We must continue teaching and revising these best practices as we learn more.

In response to some of the recent talk about the quality of PHP and some of the recent suggestions about the right and wrong ways to write PHP, the PHP The Right Way site has been lunched.

There’s a lot of bad information on the Web (I’m looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web. It is important to understand there is no canonical way to use PHP. That’s the beauty of it. This website introduces new PHP developers to best practices, available options, and good information.

The site has some "getting started" tips for working with PHP 5.4, links to some of the current PSR standards and gets into some of the best practices for things like proper OOP structure, namespacing and using the SPL. There's also hints on using Composer for package management, working with databases and some basic parts on security and testing.

Additionally, the site is also an open source project so you can contribute your own content (it'll have to be approved before merging) on topics you might not see or want to improve.

On Reddit.com there's a good discussion going on to answer the question "What non-PHP stuff should a PHP developer know?"

I was looking at job description for a web developer, and one of the big responsibilities was database maintenance. [...] And along those lines, what other skills would be useful for a PHP developer to have that aren't directly PHP-based?

Suggestions so far include things like:

• Linux command-line skills
• some Python
• Virtualization (making and administering VMs)
• Version control systems (svn or git)
• Database architecture
• HTML/CSS/Javascript