The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode (#53, released December 31st) with a year in review and some of their own experiences over the last year.

In this weeks episode Mick and Edd reflect on their busy years. We first discuss how work has wrapped up for the new year, and how subtle design changes result in huge benefits. Following this, we compare our personal experiences with product and agency work - chatting about the different programming design mindsets and work-flows used in each case. This leads on to the well-timed appreciation for the work of Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob and Greg Young - inc. valuable tests, the importance of a name and there not being a single 'silver bullet' to solving a problem. Finally, we wrap up with what we both would like to learn this upcoming year and Edd's experiences building a mega PC for a friend.

Topics mentioned include hexagonal architecture, using pull requests as code reviews and domain driven design. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or download the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

That Podcast have posted their last episode of 2014, The one to cap 2014. Join hosts Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall as they talk about the happenings of 2014 and a wide variety of other topics.

Beau and Dave wrap up 2014 discussing a bunch of stuff. Dave was too excited about Christmas to write something more descriptive for this sentence. This one too.

Topics mentioned in the episode include:

• the Dev Discussions project
• PHP South Coast Conference
• Code Climate
• Five Minutes with the PHP Bard
• CousCous
• PHP Package Checklist

...and many more. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

In a new post to his site Ben Ramsey talks about why dates are hard and can be frustrating to work with sometimes. It revolves around an issue he recently found with calculating a time for a UUID and days of the week.

No, I’m not talking about a meeting with a lover or potential lover. While those can be stressful, the calendar math used to determine the precise date and time on which such a meeting might occur is infinitely more difficult to perform. To software programmers, this isn’t news, but I recently encountered an issue when calculating the time for an RFC 4122 UUID that had me questioning the accuracy of our modern, accepted calendars, especially with regard to the days of the week on which our dates fall.

In his work on his UUID library, he came across a the bug because of some failing unit tests. It was only happening in certain versions of PHP and upon further investigation found the issue to be a wrong day of the week from a date in 1582 (the correct value being Sunday). As it turned out, the date in question was actually a Saturday and his local environment was reporting bad results. The problem was with a revision made to the Gregorian calendar, removing 10 days causing a difference between the Gregorian and Great Britain versions of 1582.

On Dzone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted what he considers to be some of the most popular Open Source PHP projects of 2011 including Symfony2, Doctrine and HipHop.

This non-scientific analysis of the popular and exciting PHP projects starts from researches on active projects on SourceForge and GitHub; the latter is where most of the collaboration and involvement of PHP developers is today. I've also crowdsourced the question on Twitter to catch projects I wasn't aware of, and I hope to do the same with you.

Other projects included in his list are:

• Symfony2 Components
• Moodle
• Composer and Packagist
• Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress

Have a project you think he missed? Let him know!

In this new post for his blog Brandon Savage takes a look back at his past year with a technology that, back then, was new to him - the Zend Framework.

About a year ago, I was introduced to Zend Framework as the framework I was going to be working with almost every day. And for nearly a year now, every day I have worked closely with Zend Framework, learning it’s intricacies and dealing with its warts. [...] A year after adopting it seemed like a good time to reevaluate the framework and reflect. Learning Zend Framework was a daunting, challenging experience that tested myself and those I worked with. I learned a few lessons that I think are important, and I think are worth sharing.

The post talks about the learning process he went through ("learning new tools is not easy. the tool you pick doesn't change that) and some recommendations for those wanting to learn a new technology - not just the Zend Framework: dive in without hesitation and don't doubt your decision until you really get a feel for the technology.

If you've been around the Zend Framework community for any length of time, no doubt you've seen the monthly Bug Hunt Days they put on to help improve the quality of the framework itself. Now that a new year has rolled over Ralph Schindler has taken a look at the past year of Bug Hunt Days to offer a little perspective.

010 closed out on a pretty good note for the Zend Framework developer community. The december bug-hunt closed out with a solid 37 issues (as of Jan. 12, 2011). [...] All in all, 2010 was a fantastic year. With the 10 monthly hunts we put on (every month minus January and March), we closed nearly 500 issues in those 2-3 days on that third week of the month. Our best month was November where we closed around 110 issues. Naturally some months were better than others, but there was never a disappointing turnout.

He gives credit to several of the contributors that have given their time over the months including Ramon H. Ornelas how recieved a grand price of a full license for Zend's Studio 8 product.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos looking back at 2010 an the life of PHP - yet another great year.

2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers. This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

Among the important happenings of this past year he mentions the issues surrounding PHP6, HipHop and PHP running on the Andriod platform. He speculates on a few things that we can expect from PHP in the upcoming year(s) like the release of PHP 5.4. Also included are some updates that were made to the PHPClasses.org site itself.

Elizabeth Naramore, one of the founding members of the PHPWomen group, has posted a new to her blog today. The post is a list of things that've been happening in the group recently but might not be the most public.

Some of the happenings she mentions are the inclusion of a new member, Remi Woler, into their core advisory group, the over 600 members in their forums, ideas for raising money to contribute towards charities and an effort to create and maintain a calendar of events happening in the PHP community.

If you're interested in helping out, drop Elizabeth an email (elizabeth .at. naramore .dot. net) or you can contact any of the other members of the group via their forums or their blogs.

The php|architect podcast has just released its latest episode - "2009 in Review" with plenty of hosts and guests including Marco Tabini, Arbi Arzoumani and Matthew Weier O'Phinney.

Happy 2010! We're back with another episode of the php|architect Podcast. In this episode, which shall henceforth be referred to as the one where Marco realizes that hosting a podcast with bronchitis may not be the best of ideas, our special guest is Zend's Matthew Weier O'Phinney, head of Zend Framework.

They mostly talk about the conferences from the past year including php|tek, ZendCon and the Microsoft Web Developer Summit. You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player, download the mp3 or subscribe to the feed to get the latest updates.

Lars Strojny has posted a leaflet to his blog looking at some of the PHP development practices that should be encouraged in 2009. The list includes:

• Developments to object-oriented code practices
• Using a VCS
• Continuous deployment
• More code testing
• More use of rapid application development tools
• Monitoring of production systems
• Bytecode caching
• and more...

These are just some suggestions of things to look towards including the best if them all - "love your code".