Laura has been working at Mozilla for over a year now, and has been leveraging the CakePHP framework in many high-visibility Mozilla projects, such as the Firefox Add-Ons portal, and their new single sign-on initiative. Laura is a prolific speaker and writer, as well as an active member of the Open Source community. She has co-written the top selling PHP/MySQL book in the world, "PHP & MySQL Web Development" (Sams, 4th Edition). Mozilla has the largest known installation of the CakePHP in the world.

You can either subscribe to their feed and get this and other great CakePHP-related content or you can just grab the mp3 by itself and start listening.

She talks about why your code should be simple, get the job done, secure, scale easily and be easy to maintain.

You can grab the episode directly from here.

This is part of Informit's podcast series On Open Source: Part 1, Part 2.

I rant about frameworks, Luke talks about PHP security, and we offer advice for young programmers. I hope you enjoy it, it was fun to record.

For more open source related podcasts, check out the Informit page for topics like software freedom, Microsoft, monetization and SourceForge.

From the official press release:

As principal, Thomson is responsible for ensuring that OmniTI builds and delivers the most appropriate web-based solutions to meet the specific requirements of each client. Thomson's new role has expanded to include guaranteeing optimal quality during every OmniTI customer engagement. This includes ensuring that all client solutions are scalable, highly secure and able to perform on a level that exceeds customer expectations. She is also responsible for growing OmniTI's web development and client services teams as well as internal training.

Laura has authored the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (best seller) and co-authored the book "MySQL Tutorial". For more information about OmnitTI and the services they (and Laura bring to the table, check out their website.

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!

While at OSCON, I had the privilege of talking with Laura Thomson. Laura is the Director of Web Development at OmniTI. Together with husband Luke, she has written 2 books for SAMS publishing on PHP; "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (currently 3/e) and "MySQL Tutorial". She joined the OmniTI team in August of 2005 and moved to the United States in January of 2006.

She was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about PHP, OmniTI and other interesting topics. Here's what she had to say.

Specifically, Cal asks questions about why she chose to get into PHP, how she ended up at OmniTI, a bit about the company and her role there, and some general questions about her personal likes and dislikes surrounding technology today.