In this recent post to his blog Brian Smithwick talks about the "locked box" that developers can sometimes restrict themselves to - getting to comfortable in the tech they already know and not branching out.

Jason Austin gave a great presentation at CodeWorks Raleigh recently about cultivating one's passion for software development through side projects -- safe spaces where we can play with new technologies and techniques. The point's well taken: as developers, we're probably putting most of our energy towards the thing that must be solved, that keeps us employed, that pays our bills. [...] And so all of us, at one time or another, end up in a backwater of our own devising -- a locked box.

He also puts an emphasis on collaboration and community as it relates to becoming a better developer. By interacting with other code and other projects' developers, you learn not only more about other ways to develop but are exposed to ideas you may not have come across on your own.

I'd add that active participation in the local community is just as important though: the opportunities for exposure to new ideas outside your sphere are greater than your feed reader will probably provide, and the depth of information that you can get in a conversation may be better than any blog post or man page.

These days there's much more involved in making a good, solid web application than just the platform you serve from. Joshua Thijssen knows this and humorously points it out in a new post about a "LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH-stack" (that's fifteen different technologies for those counting).

Back in the good old days - and in internet-time, this actually means just a few years ago - people were quite happy with their LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. With this quartet, or a variation on it like PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, we could do everything: create a blog-site, setup an e-commerce web shop, making a guestbook, you name it and it was there.. But times have changed... radically.

He talks about this "brave new world" developers live in today where they can't know everything that happens in every facet of the application (he likens it to the responsibilities of generals vs infantry in the army).

As a programmer, you simply cannot pretend that you and you alone are running a system. You are part of a whole, and even though you might be the most important part, or the controlling part, you still need to work with other components in order to get the job done. If you forget this, no matter how good your part is running, the whole system will fail because you either decided to do too much yourself, or did not correctly utilize the rest of the system.

Wondering what his acronym stands for? LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH is short for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Gearman, Memcached, Varnish, Ngnix, MongoDB, CouchDB, Solr, Tika, Redit, ActiveMQ, Hadoop."

Chris Roane has a new post to his Montana Programmer blog talking about some of the things he's learned over the past few years in his development work.

Over the last few years I've become more familiar with multiple systems. I go over a few things that I've learned and the areas that I hope to improve upon over the next year.

His list of technology (including SVN, Drupal, WordPress and things like mailing list software and linux) serve as a good example to the wider world of developers out there to not become complacent in your skills and to be constantly learning. It doesn't have to be amazing, high level topics to be important - some of the best tools are the little things that help you work smarter and faster.

php|architect has announced a new effort they've launched to recognize the groups and projects in the PHP community that have had an impact. The Impact Awards is a yearly effort to recognize those contributions.

In short, we at php|architect recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. We build our site, our training and our magazine using tools created by developers who are giving freely of themselves. We want to recognize a few of those who have had an impact specifically on the PHP community. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of April to all php|architect subscribers. The winners will be announced at php|tek '11 in Chicago.

To vote, go over to the Impact Awards site and pick from their selections of people from categories like: the groups around various frameworks, integration/development, data management and up and coming projects. The winner will be presented with an actual award as designed by Toronto-based architect Alex Ilievski.

NetTuts.com has posted what they call the ACBs of Web Development, a list of technologies - one for each letter of the alphabet - that you as a web developer would do well to learn at least a little about.

Web development can often be an utterly perplexing affair. Today, aimed at beginners, I'd like to introduce you to twenty six concepts or technologies, each mapping to a letter of the alphabet. Sounds wonky? It probably is!

Technologies in their list include:

• Ajax
• Firebug
• Keyword Optimization
• Node.js
• Source Control
• WordPress

For each letter they've also included a few links to some related reading on the subject.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans has had some fun with salaries - specifically the salary information recently posted by Dice.com.

Every year dice.com puts together a salary survey for those of us working in tech. It's a chance to look at what other developers say they are making and either snicker or sigh wishfully. This week they released "2010-11 Tech Salary Survey Results". [...] To me, page 5 was the most interesting. Page 5 is a table of salaries by metro area.

He's created a table to lay out the data in a bit more readable (and normalized) format with Charlotte, North Carolina being the baseline and other cities diverging up and down (in salary range) from there. It helps you compare both the salary range and the normalized version of it that includes some of the cost of living that comes along with the location.

Lorna Mitchell has posted her second part of her "tips for [tech] event hosting" series (first part here) with some suggestions for the day of the event - those last minute things that might get forgotten.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. [...] As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well.

She makes suggestions about the little things - ensuring name badges are ready, a posted schedule of the happenings at the event (not every event will have programs), check in on all of the tech like projectors, wifi and the like as well as keeping track of things like hashtags on twitter to see what people like and don't like more immediately.

On pingdom.com there's a recent article posted looking at some of the technology behind Facebook and how they manage to keep up with the huge demand put on them and their servers.

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren't practical. The challenge for Facebook's engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

They have to be able to handle over 570 billion page views a month across over 30,000 servers so there's several key technologies than they use to help make this a reality. Besides the famous HipHop for PHP tool, they also use things like memcached, Cassandra, Hadoop and Varnish. There's also other non-tech specific practices they do to keep things flowing smoothly.

In a recent post to the php|architect site Marco Tabini has a suggestion of five meta-skills he thinks every PHP developer should learn.

But being a PHP developer is much more than writing PHP code. In fact, good PHP skills would be something that I would take for granted that every PHP developer should have'"and, if enough employers are as crazy as I am, there's a chance that I'm not the only one who wants to look beyond mere PHP to decide who is good and who is exceptional.

His list five of meta-skills for the PHP developer covers a wide range of things, not just involving the technology of web development:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Understanding business
• Coming to grips with reality
• Using the phone
• Being humble

On the ThinkPHP blog today there's a new post looking at one of the better offerings for making desktop applications with the web-related skills you already know - CodeStrong (as a part of the Appcelerator/Titanium project).

Looking how to develop a desktop application in a short term, I came accross "Titanium Developer". This Open-Source tool helps you to create desktop apps. The special feature about it is the possibility to use well-known Web-Technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and PHP. Thus, learning a new programming language is no longer necessary. Another advantage is that you can directly create binaries for Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code.

They look at some example code to create a basic "Hello World" kind of tool and show how PHP can be embedded directly into the code, as made possible by the native PHP support introduced from contributions from people like Ben Ramsey.