Over on the PC World site, there's a new article posted about Etsy and its development practices and how it "grows in a unique fashion" because of them.

The Etsy staffers are also completely serious about their work, and these two features they share in common with their customer base, who are tying to earn side money, if not pay the rent, by designing the hand bags, walking sticks and hand-made chocolates that have made Etsy famous in the artisan and sustainable business scene. [...] The quality model for Etsy is cutting edge, but not unique. New developers are expected to push code to production on day one. That's not commit code, but push it to production.

The article gets into some of the technology they use there at Etsy (including NodeJS, Nagios and, of course, PHP), the atmosphere they try to maintain, how they do their code deployment and how they conform to various regulations, security and privacy concerns.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics that he's generated for the month of May 2007:

• PHP Evolution Statistics
• PHP Statistics

New developments this month include a record growth in PHP5 adoption (up 1.6 percent) with all of the PHP 5.2 versions gaining more users. PHP 5.2 is now topping out as the third most popular version with PHP 4.4.7 dropping consistently and losing more and more users.

New this month : a map of China and USA with detail by province and state. As usual, lots of other details : PHP versions, Apache, country details, etc. Feel free to ask any other details, stats or context about the study.

There's one simple fact in programming - coders love to code. They enjoy getting into the code, getting their hands dirty, and working through the problems to get everything working. After that, however, things can kind of slack off, especially in the area of support. Some projects don't even have documentation to help out with the installation. So, how can you, as a developer, be better about helping your users? Read on in this new A/R/T article (from Stefan Koopmanschap) for a few ideas.

You work on a nice piece of open source software, alone or in a team. You can handle all you want by yourself. You plan everything, determine which features should be included, and of course you support your users. No problem. Until the moment comes that your software actually becomes popular. Popular enough to bring in a lot of new users. They all have questions regarding your software.

Instead of developing all the new features that you thought of, you find yourself more and more answering questions of users. From those questions, you get even more ideas, for instance on how to improve user interaction. But you have no time to work on those ideas anymore. Clearly, you have a need to offer more structured support.

He makes several suggestions of steps to take to a higher level of service to your users, including adding more people to your team and using other technologies (email, IRC, etc) to your advantage. Think about how many projects have channels over on the Freenode IRC network...