For the past three days I’ve been travelling to a roundtable in Palo Alto, California to meet with Ning, the developers of a platform that allows you to create any social network for any purpose. They brought together some of the most important and largest networks on Ning to solicit feedback, gain input, and tell [...]

Have you ever been handed some code and told, “make it work”? If you haven’t, chances are good you will some day. It’s often a daunting task, especially since, as one programmer told me, “comments come when the second developer has to make changes.” While this is likely bad coding practice, it’s happened to me [...]

Cal Evans sent around ratings from ZendCon sessions yesterday, and there seems to be a great deal of debate on Twitter about what they mean. Are they indicators of a person’s suitability to speak? Are they indicators of where a person’s weaknesses are?
Both Matthew Turland and Ben Ramsey wrote that they were less than excited [...]

There are two really great experiences in my PHP life: the day I learned how to use PHP, and the day I installed XDebug. Ok, perhaps that’s an overstatement, but XDebug is one of the best tools I’ve ever used. I think every developer should use it, and for the next part of this series [...]

PHP has a large number of tools for fixing bugs and resolving underlying issues. But many people don’t know what they are, and some of them are extensions requiring installation in order to work. In this series, we’ll explore some features for debugging PHP scripts, from the most basic to more advanced.
Today we will discuss [...]