Cal's "three questions" for Derick involve

• How did you come up with the idea and how did the project get started?
• What's been the most fun and interesting part about building the community around XDebug?
• What's the hardest lesson you've learned about running a project like XDebug?

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed to get the latest as they're released.

Derick gives a little background about himself (including being a PHP evangelist for 10gen) and how he ended up working with MongoDB. They talk about how MongoDb is different and some of the involvement he has in contributing to open source projects and the OpenStreetMap project.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the file directly.

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense.

For more information, check out their event page, complete with details about the venue and maps to the location.

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The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can also page through his slides as you listen.

Cal's questions mainly revolve around Derick's contributions the PHP core (and one on OpenStreetMap):

• Do you consider the current way PHP is developed functional or broken (and why)?
• What would you do to change the way PHP is developed and why would you want to do it that way?
• Explain to us what OpenStreetMap and why you think this is an important project.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

This session explain a certain set of design issues for library code that either is often extended, or created with extending and inheritance in mind. There are many ways how a library can be designed to make it both easier to test, as well as for external developers to consume and use. This presentation provides techniques for doing so.

You can either listen via the in-page player or download the mp3 directly. Be sure to check out the other great episodes too!

A first look at the topic (Date and Time) might get you thinking, "Why the hell do I need a book to teach me about time?" But further investigating, and some life experience will show you that dealing with Date and Time is not always as straightforward as "Its twelve o'clock". Derick's book gives you an in depth look into handling various factors of date and time such as timezones and days that did not exist, as well as finally delivering something missing from php.net: documentation of the DateTime Object.

Rafael mentions some of what the book contains - an introduction to date/time, calendar switches, daylight savings, manipulating date/time values and how the internals of the language uses timezones.

On May 30th, 2009, eZComponents hosted the third annual PHP Vikinger Unconference in Leuven, Belgium. Among the speakers there were Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar, both of whom were at the recent two day "PHP Developers Meeting" in Chicago, IL, US.

The video has them talking (for about forty minutes) about the notes that were taken during the meeting. If you don't have time to watch the video, you can also read the notes over on the PHP.net wiki.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2008 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself.

You can listen to this new episode in one of three ways - either download the mp3 directly, listen via the in-page player or you can subscribe to their podcast feed and get each episode delivered right to you.

If your development involves working with dates and times, then this book is a must-have. In this book, Derick Rethans (contributor to PHP's core date extension and well-known PHP expert) explores in great detail the subtle nuances of working with dates and times. Frequently PHP developers encounter unexpected results that adversely affect their software and web applications.

The book includes topics like: working with calendars, parsing date/time strings, correctly using the DateTime object and working with dates when you can't get a timestamp. You can find out more on the book's page on the php|architect website.