On IT World there's an interesting article about the programming skills that seem to be lost in today's coders and how what they may not know might hurt them in the end.

Some of these skills aren't likely to be needed again, any more than most of us need to know how to ride a horse or (sigh) drive a manual-transmission vehicle. But other skills and "lessons learned" may still or again prove relevant, whether developers are banging their heads against legacy systems, coding for new mobile and embedded devices... or other devices and applications we haven't yet thought of. [...] Here's what some industry veterans and seasoned coders think the younger generation doesn't know ... but should.

He's broken it up into a few different sections - one dealing with the lack of general hardware knowledge by a good section of the today's developers, another noting that programming is not the same as software engineering (yes, really). He also touches on the lacking idea of "thinking before coding" and how planning for errors has become less and less of an importance.

Cal Evans has posted a wrapup of the "Day Camp 4 Developers" event that happened this past Saturday. The event was targeted less towards the hard tech topics and more towards the "softer side" of things like working on resumes and furthering your career.

Well, it's done. Our first ever Day Camp 4 Developers was yesterday and was by most accounts, a rousing success. Some of the comments over at Joind.In are just wonderful. I won't rehash all the great times and comments but I do want to list a few things I learned, even if only for myself.

Some of the things he pulled from the sessions included:

• Don't write software, use the tools available
• Long breaks are bad
• People will forgive a LOT if the content is good
• Face-to-face still trumps cyberspace

Company	Syneron
Location	Irvine, CA
Title	Webmaster with PHP Skills
Summary	Do you live near Irvine, CA? Are you really good at HTML/CSS/Javascript and know some PHP as well? Syneron is looking to hire a webmaster to maintain the corporate web site and probably work on some other projects. If you're interested, send your resume to chartjes @ [the company's domain]
Link	More Information

From the ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendorfer has shared some of his experience to help those CakePHP users out there that are looking at doing more templating to their applications than just the normal index changes.

One of the things I don't see getting to much coverage is how to create good templates when working with CakePHP. Since those are written in plain PHP, this does not apply to CakePHP only. So I'm sure many people have already developed their own style that they are comfortable with and I don't ask for them to change it. However, maybe some people new to the framework / language can benifit by taking a look at the one I'm using.

He covers a few different topics:

PHP tags
• Conditions
• Loops
• the linebreak issue
• avoiding multi-line statements
• Creating Zebra striped table rows

The code included on some of the points (not the multi-line or the PHP tags items) is simple and is summed up in less than six lines.