The PHP Town Hall podcast, with hosts Amanda Folson and Ben Edmunds, has released its latest episode: Episode #53 - Developer Relations, Travel, and Bedbugs with Jessica Rose . Jessica is the lead of developer relations at Crate.io, the company that created the CrateDB product.

Jessica talks about some of her own experiences in developer relations along with some of Amanda's own experiences doing the same in past roles. They also talk about the strain developer relations can put on other parts of peoples' lives and different perspectives on work. They also talk about programming bootcamps, online training, hammocks and speaking at conferences.

You can catch this latest episode either using the in-page audio or video player or you can download the audio and listen offline. If you enjoy the show you can subscribe to their feed to get the latest episodes as they're released.

Thijs Feryn has posted his latest video interview with a member of the PHP community. In this new episode he talks with Michael Heap, a developer at Datasift, about the work he does there and traveling (as they make their way back to the airport...)

Michael Heap is a developer who works at [Datasift](http://datasift.com/). On Thursday January 28th 2016 Michael flew from London Heathrow to Brussels to attend the [PHPBenelux Conference 2016](http://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2016). Unfortunately he forgot his laptop on the plane.

While driving Michael to the airport, I decided to ask him a couple of questions and that resulted in a nice conversation.

You can watch the video using either the in-page player or over on YouTube directly. If you're more of the audio-only sort, you can catch the recording over on Soundcloud.

Thijs Feryn has posted his latest video interview with a member of the PHP community. In this new episode he talks with Michael Heap, a developer at Datasift, about the work he does there and traveling (as they make their way back to the airport...)

Michael Heap is a developer who works at [Datasift](http://datasift.com/). On Thursday January 28th 2016 Michael flew from London Heathrow to Brussels to attend the [PHPBenelux Conference 2016](http://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2016). Unfortunately he forgot his laptop on the plane.

While driving Michael to the airport, I decided to ask him a couple of questions and that resulted in a nice conversation.

You can watch the video using either the in-page player or over on YouTube directly. If you're more of the audio-only sort, you can catch the recording over on Soundcloud.

Thijs Feryn has posted his latest in his series of video interviews with members of the PHP community. In this latest episode he talks with Gary Hockin of JetBrains about developer evangelism, the PHPStorm IDE and community conferences.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Las Vegas for Zendcon where I had to opportunity to chat with a lot of friends from the PHP community. This week’s episode features Gary Hockin, developer evangelist at JetBrains. Gary advocates the PHPStorm project and is a proud Welshman.

Because Gary and I are both evangelists, one of the central themes of the interview is developer evangelism. We talk about the life, the travel, the public speaking, but also about the not so glamorous parts of the job. Throughout the conversation we also talk about PHPStorm and PHP community conferences.

You can watch the video either through his in-page video player or over on YouTube. If you prefer the audio-only route, you can also listen on SoundCloud. You can also check out previous interviews Thijs has done in this category on his site.

In his latest post Cal Evans reminds us, as software developers, that our jobs aren't always about making the things we create about the best code or most tech. It's also about having empathy for users of the software you're building.

I learned something very important in all of [the troubles I had with traveling to Amsterdam], I learned that we as software developers and designers need to have a great deal of empathy for the people using what we build. It is not enough to put yourself in your user’s shoes, you have to put yourself in their mindset. You have to design every user interaction with an understanding of not only who is using your software, but why they are using it.

He focuses the rest of the post on his experience post-delay, trying to get an update on where in the world his luggage might be via a URL given to him by the lost luggage group. He comments on the terseness of the message he was given on the page ("Delivery Initiated") but points out that it's not overly user-friendly and really doesn't give much information. He suggests that the developers of the tool didn't actually think about end users, just that they should share a status and that's all.

It is not enough to create personas and figure out who is using your software. You need to understand why they are using it, and what their mindset will be when they are using it. You need to have empathy for your users.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial by J Armando Jeronymo that shows how you can run Monte Carlo simulations in PHP (more on that simulation type here).

One of the exciting things in the 1980′s was programming simulations to solve complex analytical problems, and one of the most useful techniques employed was running Monte Carlo simulations. The approach repeatedly runs a simulation many times over to calculate the most likely outcome. Although PHP isn’t known as a scientific or research programming language, Monte Carlo simulations can easily be written in a PHP web app. In this article, I’ll show you how.

He walks you through the whole problem he tries to solve with the simulation - a multi-step trip that involved different roads, situations and possible stops along the way. He breaks it out into the various stages (labeled with letters) and shows how you might render this as a "MyTrip" class with distances in "travel minutes". Following along with the Monte Carlo randomness, though, he shows how to inject a bit of randomness into the mix accounting for some of the trouble he had along the way.

Both Keith Casey and php|architect have posted announcements about this year's CodeWorks traveling conference tour (previously announced here). First, from the official php|architect post:

CodeWorks 2010 (CWX for short) is a series of one-day technical conferences presented by the php|architect team and sponsored by Adobe. It's slated to stop in five cities, starting November 9th. [...] Each stop features talks presented by the php|a gang on various PHP-related topics, including object orientation, scalability, security, development tools and efficiently building your own APIs.

And from Keith Casey, a presenter on the tour:

This time around we've simplified the whole thing. The team is smaller. The format is simpler. And we're limiting the cities a bit more. We have four people doing 6 presentations on one track across five cities in a span of 10 days. If you've ever been to a tech conference, you know how much effort it can be.

For more information on the conference, check out its official site for dates, times and registration.

The php|architect folks have posted the details about this year's CodeWorks conference happening nine days in November and spread across five different cities all over the United States including Seattle, Orlando and Austin.

This year's theme is "Roadies, not Rock Stars". We are not rock stars, ninja's or guru's. We are code monkey's just like you and we do it because we love it. Just like you, we like to share what we have learned so others can benefit. Come join Marco Tabini, Ryan Stewart, Keith Casey and Cal Evans when we come to your town! Spend a day with us as we share with you what we've learned.

At each stop, this crew of four will present a one-day series of talks on things ranging from unit testing to APIs to working with OOP in PHP 5.3. You can find out more about the sessions that will be presented at your closest location on the CodeWorks site. You can also register and get in for the Early Bird price of $75 USD for a single ticket or $70 USD if you're part of a group.

Ibuildings has officially wrapped up their "Elephpant Challenge" contest they were holding to solve a routing problem that involved a globe-trotting PHP ElePHPant. Their latest post (from Ivo Jansch) reveals the results.

Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

The shorted route, found using the Haversine Formula, involved stops in Mexico City, Cupertino, Hawaii and the Tower of Pisa. The winner for the Medium category was Andy Thompson with an average of 10 landmarks with 38 lines of code (in 333 seconds). The winner in the Senior category was Michiel Brandenburg with coming out on top with a runtime of 50 seconds in 46 lines of code.

The post also includes some interesting observations they found about the event including contestants' general adherence to the specs, how the choices the developers made really made a difference in the outcome and how difficult running a contest like this could really be. Congrats to the winners!