The PHP North West conference has posted a video from this year's event - the keynote from Ian Barber of his "How to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants" session.

As software engineers, we all have the potential to navigate the history of our industry, tease out the genius from what has come before, and build a platform for our own ideas. By doing so, we can see that little bit further and in turn provide the foundations for others to build on what we have done.

In this session we'll look at how the history of the web itself is rooted in sharing information and how modern giants like Google and Facebook are founded on what came before them, while being driven forwards by the ecosystems they helped build. We'll see how successful open source projects leverage the past, and how by following some simple principles we can make use of the information, projects and people around us to improve ourselves and our careers.

You cab view other videos from the 2010 event on the PHPNW video channel on blip.tv.

The Voices of the ElePHPant has posted their latest episode today - an interview with Ian Barber, an employee of IBuildings. Cal's "three questions" this time focus on some of the experience Ian has had with managing software projects.

• Is project management different when working with PHP and related technologies as opposed to desktop software development?
• What was the hardest problem you had to face with remote developers and how did you overcome it?
• What's the best advice you have for project managers trying to balance a customers' wants versus what the team can deliver?

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

While not specifically about deploying PHP applications, Ian Barber's talk at the recent ThinkVitamin Code Management and Deployment Conference is packed full of good tips you can use in your web application deployment. He talks about everything from version control strategies, continuous integration, remote releases, package management, hotfixes and one of the most difficult things to do - rollback.

Still deploying sites and updates manually via FTP? This session will cover a number of automated deployment methods, best practice workflow for updating sites and fixing bugs, along with how to use staging servers, deploying to multiple machines, zips tars & scripts, packaged releases hotfixes, database changes, rollbacks and more.

There's tons of technologies mentioned, so you'd be better off going through his slides and taking your own notes. Unfortunately, a recording of the session isn't currently publicly available, but the slides are an excellent resource for those currently looking to better their overall deployment process.