This week, our Community Voice author is Michael Wales, a programmer, a father, an aspiring author, and an award winning Airman. For the past 3 years, he's been focusing the majority of his time on CodeIgniter. He is among the most consistent contributors to the community, has released numerous libraries and tutorials, and is one of the most highly sought after freelancers within the community.

Michael talks about some of his experiences in developing web applications - both CodeIgniter driven and not. He notes that the framework does allow him to look at things from "outside the box" a bit more since it takes the hard bits off his shoulders.

Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica's account of her day.

Ghica's day included Zeev Suraski's talk, Marco Tabini's presentation on mayo (oh, and application design) and well as talks from Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchell and Stefan Priebsch (oh, and the infamous Terry Chay).

This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

As he sees it, there's three categories:

• The Good - things like the ZCE
• The Bad - proof of testing but no proof of experience
• The Ugly - failing to have anything to show your ability/knowledge

It's all about image, even when it comes to hiring a good programmer. Employers are looking first for someone who even vaguely looks like they know their stuff, then they dive deeper into the real skills and talents that potential employee might have.