On the Laravel News site they've spotlighted a resource that can help you get the best performance out of your Laravel-based applications: Performant Laravel.

Performant Laravel is a new free video course created by Chris Fidao that covers quick performance wins you can implement right now into your Laravel apps.

The course includes 12 videos that range from three minutes up to twenty minutes, which makes them the perfect size for binge watching during your breaks.

Topics include the use of the "optimize" command, configuration caching, eager loading, MySQL indexing and object caching. The course is free but you do have to sign up to gain access.

On the Cloudways blog they've posted another interview with a member of the PHP community. This time they talk with Anna Filina, a well-known speaker and one of the organizers of the Confoo conference that happens in both Montreal and Vancouver.

Today we are honored to have Anna Filina for this interview. She was a vice president at FooLab and an organizer for ConFoo, a world-renowned conference for developers in Montreal and Vancouver area. Additionally, Anna speaks regularly at international PHP conferences, provides training and consultancy to the developers around the world.

In the interview Anna answers questions about:

• How she got started in development
• What topics she usually covers in her training sessions
• Her favorite framework
• Her opinions on conferences

The interview finishes with Anna talking about some of the things she does to unwind and relax when she's not training or running Confoo.

A new service has launched in an effort to help teach PHP to those looking to learn in a different sort of way. The phpschool.io site provides you with a series of exercises that walk you through both the fundamentals of the language and a few more complex topics.

PHP School is a set of ever expanding workshops to teach you basic to advanced concepts in PHP. We launch with one workshop: Learn You PHP. [...] Each exercise increases in difficulty, guiding you through the core concepts of PHP.

Currently the tutorials cover topics like "My First IO", separation of concerns, working with exceptions and handling dependencies. The installation of the lessons is as simple as making a composer require call and installing the packages and dependencies required by the tool. They're also actively looking for community contributions to add more workshops to the based on the Learn You PHP package currently included. The training was inspired by what NodeSchool provides for the Node.js language.

Alfred Nutile has posted information about a series of Laravel-related training videos that aim to help you go from "Laravel 0 to Deploy" as they walk you through the creation and deployment of a simple blog based on the Laravel framework features.

The two of us come together in this raw footage of building a Blog in Laravel. You get both the insights of an experienced Laravel Software Writer (Alfred Nutile) and the questions of a WordPress developer new to Laravel, (Joe Bacal)

As of the time of this post there's four episodes in the series with more planned:

• Episode 1: Getting Started, Install, Scaffolding, Blog/Post Index, Create, Validation etc
• Episode 2: Pagination, Search and Authentication!
• Episode 3: Relations, Theme Work and CSS Fun
• Episode 4: Tagging, Image Uploads and Searching by Images

Other topics to come include working with Homestead, managing Gulp dependencies, creating a contact form and working with single page applications.

The Run Geek Radio podcast, with host and PHP community member Adam Culp, has posted their latest episode today: Episode #007: Don't be a Jerk

The topic for this episode is how developers treat other developers and consultants, and how we should strive to stick to the facts, stay professional, and not get personal. He shares a story of a friend and the trials they went through because another developer, in their haste to convince the client of their value, went on the attack of the consultant.

Adam also talks about his own conference talk plans and training for the Keys100 race. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show directly. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

In this latest post to the Inviqa blog they ask the question "how clean is your code?" and offer a few tips to help it get that way (and stay that way).

During the Test Driven Development training (which includes Behat, and PHPspec) run by Marcello Duarte, I was particularly blown away by one of his many and funny analogies… “Would you have any surgery carried out by a doctor who does not wash his hands?” Everybody in the room shook their heads. Of course nobody would. There is too a high risk of complications. In software development ‘infected’ code can translate to bugs, bad user experience, poor performance and the complete failure of web applications.

He talks briefly about some of the lessons learned in this training session, pointing out that while it's not the easiest method to apply, it pays off in the long run of your code's "hygiene". He points out that the [Inviqa] group's success rate with TDD/BDD has reflected in the bottom line of their enterprise clients too.

On NetTuts.com today they've made an announcement about a new PHP testing course they're making available for free. The course is an introduction to testing your PHP applications and is taught by Andrew Perkins.

In this course, Andrew Perkins will teach you the very basics of testing in the PHP language. Learn what is needed to test PHP applications and why testing is important. Explore the differences between regular testing, test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). Along the way, take a look at the various frameworks that are available, to make sure your PHP websites run just as you expected. And lastly, compare and contrast the different types of tests that you can run such as unit, functional, and acceptance tests.

The training course covers a lot of the basics behind testing and several of the tools you can use along the way including PHPUnit, Codeception and Behat. It's a pretty quick overview, so don't expect too much in-depth coding and testing examples. The course with all videos included comes in at just a bit over an hour of content. You can find out more and sign up to have access to the training here.

Brandon Savage has posted some ideas about making conferences better and how they can appeal to a wider (and maybe more inexperienced) level of developer.

I love PHP conferences. I attended a lot of PHP conferences when I was a brand new developer. Zendcon, OSCON, php[tek], Wordcamp Baltimore, DC PHP and others were my stomping grounds. I learned a lot, and the conferences I attended were on the whole useful, beneficial and wonderful experiences. But I also felt challenged by the fact that conferences don’t offer much for bringing up new developers with concrete information and training. This isn’t necessarily the fault of conferences: it’s impossible to truly impart a useful skill into a developer with only a 45 minute talk.

He includes four ideas in the post and talks some about the role of training at the events:

• Are conferences even the right place for training?
• Creating Different Tracks of Different Lengths
• Including Hands-On Training During Tutorial Days
• Offer Learning-Focused Hackathons

He also notes that some of it is up to the developers to find a good fit for what they need and the skills they're looking to learn. There's other options out there besides just the usual conferences, too and, as Brandon states, "investing in your career is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself."

On 7PHP.com today Khayrattee Wasseem has posted an interview with Musketeers.me about their recent move to being the owners of the php|architect brand and all of its products/events.

If you were having a sky-diving on planet Mars since the past months, or if you were too enthusiastic in getting lost within The Hobbit’s World – wake up Sid! There’s news concerning PHP Land! On “its” 10th birthday, last December 2012, your “PHP Magazine for PHP Professionals“ (The one & only PHP|Architect) announced on its portal that it’s brand, owned by BlueParabola, is being ‘safely & soundly‘ handed over to The PHP Musketeers aka Musketeers.me for a smooth and more dynamic life.

In the interview they talk about things like:

• The motivation behind the acquisition
• Positives and negatives of the brand as they see them
• Future plans for the magazine and brand
• What they see as the overall goals for php|architect
• What kind of challenges they see in the road ahead

You can read the full interview here and find out more about this change on the php|architect site.

A Kickstarter project has been started up by Alan Forbes to author a book (and full training course) to "bring the joy back" into learning PHP - The Joy of PHP Programming (e-book and course).

PHP is a great programming language. It's free, powerful, relatively easy to setup and learn, and it has extensions and frameworks available to do almost anything you could imagine. Frankly, it's just plain fun too. But if you've never programmed before or have programmed before but not with PHP and want to learn it, wouldn't it be great to find a tutorial that conveyed the sheer joy of it? That's what I want to do!

It plans to be an introductory book, starting developers from the ground up to teach them things like basic usage, project organization, working with user input and bits on frontend and backend frameworks. There's already over 150 backers for the project and just 20 days remaining so if you're interested in learning more about it or want to contribute, check out this page on Kickstarter.com.