The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode (hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) - Episode 11: "From Gas Station Attendant to Java Developer".

This time out we are blessed by the presence of Fictive Kin brosef of Ed. We explore Jo ël's rags-to-riches story: a young academic schlepping coffee and 44oz soft drinks at a gas station, where he's discovered by a grizzled dev team manager in need of Java skills. From there it's been a whirlwind of web sites, programming languages, and more ops than you can shake a stick at. Actually I was sleepy and wasn't really listening for the first half-hour. I bet it's good though.

You can listen to this latest episode by grabbing the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed (either RSS or iTunes) and get this and other great episodes.

On his blog Brandon Savage has a new post reviewing a book from Chris Hartjes, "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable Applications".

When most developers think about books on testing, they think about books that highlight things like "test driven development" or "how to build a test for X." [...] This is not true of Chris Hartjes' book, "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications". When I asked Chris if I could review his book, I expected a step-by-step guide to writing tests. What I got was a step-by-step guide to building an application that COULD be tested. There's a big difference, and it's important to understand the distinction.

He points out that the book provides more about good application structure than who to write the tests for it. It provides a guide to creating modular applications that can be easily pulled apart and tested as well as some practical examples. He also includes a few "wise words" quoted from the book including: "if it's not yours, wrap it up" and "testing is good; testable applications are better."

You can pick up your own copy of the book fron its page on the Leanpub site.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode - an interview with Chris Hartjes, author of the "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications", advocate of application testing and podcaster in his own right.

Cal's "three questions" for Chris revolve (mostly) around his testing emphasis:

• Which unit testing framework do you recommend and why do you choose it over other options?
• What is "enough" when it comes to testing your applications?
• What's the biggest challenge you've faced in organizing a user group and how did you handle it?

You can listen to this latest episode either via downloading the mp3 directly.

7php.com has posted their latest interview with a member of the PHP community - Chris Hartjes, the "grumpy programmer".

In this edition I talked with Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer), the co-organizer of the GTA PHP User Group (@gtaphp). Chris is a real Grumpy PHP Programmer! But grumpy in a very positive sense though. He focuses his effort in applying and transcending his best practice ideals with the codes he write. I would tag him as the "perfectionist programmer"; he will not hesitate to scrap his piece of work if he finds a fault or a room for improvement and start all over again with that "eye for perfection". In this interview, he will talk a bit about those coding best practices fortunately.

Chris answers questions about:

• His history with PHP
• His favorite PHP book
• What tools he uses (IDE)
• His description of the PHP community
• His favorite conference

You can read the answers to these and more in the full interview.

The /dev/hell podcast has released their latest episode with special guest Brian Moon (of dealnews).

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The latest episode of the DevHell podcast has been posted - Episode 3, "Beatings Will Continue Until Test Coverage Improves".

Fresh off our holiday break, we're back with our longest show yet. We talk about Chris' new book The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications, including his experiences self-publishing with Leanpub. Chris also explains how he fears no precipitation on his excursions to the Codemash conference in Ohio. Then Ed talks about the thought process that lead to his latest shit-stirring blog post "The MicroPHP Manifesto." Ed may or may not begin crying openly. Finally, we discuss when it might be necessary to trash your existing application and rewrite it.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest interview with a member of the PHP community. This time it's with Chris Hartjes.

Cal's "three questions" for Chris center around some of his experience with frameworks:

• Are frameworks a good thing or a bad thing for PHP developers?
• If you could talk to the heads of all of the major frameworks, what would you tell them?
• What advice do you have for those new to PHP when selecting a framework?

You can listen either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can subscribe to their feed and get the latest right in your feed reader.

Matt Curry has posted his review of the recently released "Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP" book from Chris Hartjes. The book looks to help developers get a better feel for using CakePHP in real-world applications.

Shortly after Chris Hartjes released his new book Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP he contacted me and asked if I'd be willing to review it. I jumped at the chance and Chris emailed me the DRM free PDF. After posting it to The PirateBay, I settled in and gave it a read.

Overall, Matt found the content of the book good but had a few things he might change - the "too smooth" nature of the update to CakePHP and the inclusion of a "partial refactoring" section (one that talked about only updating part of an application to the framework and integrating it with the rest of the site).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest podcast episode in their PHP Abstract series today. The show i shosted by Chris Hartjes again (see his previous show) and discusses the difference between "glue" and "full stack" frameworks.

Today's special guest is Chris Hartjes. Chris has been building PHP applications since 1998. Currently employed as a Senior Developer for the Cake Development Corporation, Chris has been labeled as an "agent provocateur" within the PHP community. [...] Today Chris is going to talk to us today about Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack frameworks.

The show can be downloaded directly from here or, as always, you can drop the url to their feed into your favorite aggregator and get this and other great episodes of PHP Abstract.

Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a newly posted interview with Chris Hartjes a developer and speaker in the PHP community.

I first met Chris Hartjes at php|works in Toronto where he was giving his What Can PHP Learn From Ruby on Rails talk. As I described him in one of my blogs from php|works, he looks like a biker with a laptop. He's large but he's always got a smile on his face and is always available to help if you've got PHP questions. Chris was kind enough to sit down with me and spend some time talking about PHP and his work at VerticalScope . Here's how our conversation went.

They talk about how Chris got into programming (including his first computer), his work with vBulletin, a little MySQL discussion, and some thoughts on PHP6.