36 \ November 2018 \ http://www.phparch.comCommunity Corner
Leveling up
James Titcumb
The tech industry moves at an incredible pace. Libraries, tools, and best practices change
frequently, and keeping up with things can be hard. In this issue of Community Corner, I’ll explore
a few different avenues you can use to learn more and level up your skills.Events
User groups and many conferences
are community-organized events
which provide huge value for the cost
with regards to gaining experience and
networking. User groups typically draw
more local attendees, but conferences
can often attract a broader audience
and therefore more people to network
with. Sometimes, the so-called “hallway
track” on its own can provide value, as
you can discuss problems, best prac-
tices, and so on with your peers there
and then.
The downside is, conferences can be
expensive: hotel, travel, food, and so on
all add up. Thankfully, while you don’t
get the benefit of networking directly,
many conferences record their talks
and put them on YouTube for others
to benefit from later. This also benefits
attendees of conferences with multiple
tracks where they might want to see
two talks scheduled simultaneously.
There are plenty of other kinds of
events to consider. Unconferences,
WordCamps, DrupalCamps, and hack-
athons are all great to attend, and you
can pick up new skills. Sometimes the
more informal events encourage better
interaction and hacking on projects
due to their nature, hackathons espe-
cially so. These don’t have to be physical
events, but also digital events, such as
Hacktoberfest which was run by Digita-
lOcean, Twilio, and GitHub last month.
There are some online-only conferences
popping up these days too, such as
Laracon Online, Day Camp 4 Develop-
ers, as well as online user groups such as
Nomad PHP and Nomad Mage.Podcasts
Podcasts are an interesting medium
to learn from. Mainly they’re an audible
medium which can make discussing
code and technical implementations a
little more challenging, but are some-
times accompanied by videos which
can help. While podcasts such as
Cal Evans’ Voices of the ElePHPant
don’t have a focus on learning, the
conversations he has with community
members can uncover new technolo-
gies you might not have heard about.
Then, there are podcasts such as PHP
To w n Ha l l^1 , PHP Roundtable^2 , The PHP
Architect podcast^3 , PHPUgly^4 and the
now-defunct /dev/hell which are a mix
of general listening, technical discus-
sions, and personal development advice.
These kinds of podcasts will often help
you to keep in touch with the movement
of other developers in the community.
They’re ideal for those of us with a long
commute to the office too!To find other PHP-related podcasts,
visit PHP Podcasts^5Books, News, and Writing
Those of us who prefer to learn from
books and magazines also have a huge
selection of tech books to read. Lean-
pub has allowed thousands of tech
writers to publish their own books1 PHP Town Hall: https://phptownhall.com
2 PHP Roundtable:
https://www.phproundtable.com
3 The PHP Architect podcast:
https://www.phparch.com/podcast/
4 PHPUgly: https://www.phpugly.com/
5 PHP Podcasts:
https://www.phppodcasts.comwithout a publisher. Sometimes these
can be just short catalogs of some great
tips; other times they are comparable
to a fully-fledged tech book from more
traditional book publishers, such as
PHP Architect. The advantage of using a
publisher, of course, is the promotional
aspect—you have an assigned editor,
the content is reviewed for technical
correctness, and so on. I’m trying to be
as impartial as possible, but as a phys-
ical magazine medium, I don’t know
of any other published magazines that
focus on the world of PHP except for
php[architect], and well, you’re already
reading that! And again, I’m trying not
to be biased, but it’s a great way to learn
new things with some excellent techni-
cal articles with great examples.
There is of course the web, too. Many
of us have blogs and news sites we
subscribe to, or even publish ourselves.
Chris Cornutt still heads up the PHPDe-
veloper^6 which provides timely updates
and aggregation from across the PHP
community. There are also sites like the
Planet PHP blog^7 , SitePoint^8 , the Zend
Framework blog^9 , Laravel News^10 and
so on. Many community leaders keep
their own list of technical blogs from
various authors too, so it might be
worth asking around for their recom-
mendations on feeds. I always find
useful articles from blogs by people
like Rob Allen^11 and Lorna Jane^12 –often6 PHPDeveloper: https://phpdeveloper.org
7 Planet PHP blog:
http://www.planet-php.net
8 SitePoint: https://www.sitepoint.com/php/
9 Zend Framework blog:
https://framework.zend.com/blog
10 Laravel News: https://laravel-news.com
11 Rob Allen: https://akrabat.com
12 Lorna Jane: https://lornajane.net/blog