Lukas Smith has shared some of his thoughts about diversity in software development, more specifically in the community he's most involved in - the Symfony community.

In general the Symfony2 scene is quite un-diverse, at least when it comes to gender. I don't remember ever seeing a women present on a Symfony2 topic at a conference. I think the only one that I have heard speak on Symfony2 is Lorna. Alvaro mentioned that at deSymfony there was a presentation by a female speaker. That being said, skimming over the top 100 contributors I don't see a single female name.

[...] So why is that? How and where did we fail as a community? I mean I can see that we have not put a lot of emphasis on encouraging non white males (I assume despite being half iranian I also count as a white male???) to submit talks. I am not blaming anyone here for that omission, though I think it might be a good idea to change that.

He mentions some of the work that the Python community is doing to encourage this diversity and points out that most of the presenters at Symfony conferences tend to be top contributors and project leads, not just "a white male".

That being said, the topic of figuring out how to fix this in balance isn't a topic that I feel like I have much to add or that motivates me to spend the hours of my spare time I invest in coding.

Padraic Brady has posted the first in a new series of articles to his blog talking about the most recent happenings on the Zend Framework Contributors mailing list.

What's this nonsense then? Well, a few weeks ago I shot myself in the foot [...] and before my sanity returned to normal, I found myself hoodwinked on IRC into writing up weekly summaries of what is discussed in Zend Framework land.

The posts will try to bring together some of the major topics from the last week on the list. This week's features include the "where do things go?" question about files/resources, how to package up a Zend Framework 2 application, the View component in ZF2 and a few other topics. If you'd like to keep up with these weekly posts, you can follow along on the php-general tag on Padraic's blog.