The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. [...] Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head programmer on a conference call, and they ended up sending me a technical assessment quiz.

In the quiz, there was one question the prompted him to come up with his tips - ten things that you can do to keep your code clean, lean and easy to maintain. His tips include things like "use single-quotes around array indexes", "don't use open short tags" and "document your code". Some of the suggestions don't make that much of a difference, but others (like the documentation one) can make the world of difference down the line.

From Hasin Hayder's original post:

The reason behind writing this blog post is I've interviewed some candidates recently and They dont know the name of the developers of PHP, MySQL or almost any other libraries they make their living on. They dont even know the history of these tools.

Both Vidyut Luther and Chris Shiflett have posted their opinions on the approach, both supporting his ideas noting that good PHP developers are passionate about what they do. That passion usually shows itself in learning as much as they can about the language, both knee deep in code and in finding out about the community around it.

Christopher Kunz thinks a bit differently, however:

I have to ask myself: What are you guys taking? Are you seriously discussing any kind of name-dropping as an interview subject? It's not only irrelevant who created a programming language, it's even a hindrance for interviewers since all that small-talk bullshit takes precious time off the actual knowledge assessment.

On April 30, 2008, Zend's very own Zend Framework team will make themselves available for a 2-hour Q&A session. You can submit your questions in advance here to give us an opportunity to think them over a bit, or you can surprise us with them during the webinar.

The webinar will be happening On April 30th at 9am PDT and will last about two hours, during which any and all (hopefully) questions about the framework will be answered.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has also posted about it over on his blog.

New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.

They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.