Summary: Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics, and I sat down at SymfonyLive Berlin 2014 to get to know each other. We touched on PHP's past and potential futures through HHVM or PHP7, how competition and collaboration both improve open source software and how business benefits from that, Drupal 8, and more. This podcast is some extracts from that conversation! Get more done faster When I asked Dustin my old chestnut ("What is your 1st memory of ..."), his response really got to the heart of what gives us many of the benefits of using open source software: cooperation, collaboration, and contribution. Dustin's first memory of open source: "Was using PHP as a language itself and using extensions. Ten years ago, I was doing a lot of consulting and I realized every project is pretty similar, so I'd just have to tweak a couple of pieces and 'Hey, that's a new website!' I thought, 'Why am I writing all this on my own?' so I started to look at different frameworks and tools that were available and I found Symfony. All my projects were the same: I need a way to log in and out, I need a way to manage data, and I want to do all this in English and German. With all the tools available, I thought I should stop writing all this myself and use one of them. I discovered Symfony. I started building a bunch of projects on it and what I realized is that it's way better if you take an open source project and only add the pieces that are special for your project instead of having to write everything from scratch." "It made me much more productive. I spent less time getting the end result, which means I spent half the time to earn just as much money. I realized there's not only this coding benefit of leveraging much smarter people's work than mine, but there's also a business benefit," to being twice as productive ... :-) And you get to concentrate on the hard, interesting problems. "Nobody wants to write another login system. Once you've written a blog system once, you don't want to do it 50 more times." We all have the power! Here are a couple of great quotes from our conversation: "The open source world really empowers you to make a contribution. It's not just enough that you complain, but you can actually contribute the solution." "You're building on the shoulders of giants. Why solve all those problems when you can leverage an open source community: hundreds or thousands of developers that you're not paying to work on features that you benefit from. Why would you not want to leverage that?" Guest dossier Name: Dustin Whittle Work affiliation: Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics Twitter: @dustinwhittle Speaker Deck presentations LinkedIn profile Dustin's about.me page includes a long list of his (other) social media accounts. I found this nice recap of SymfonyLive Berlin 2014 where Dustin and I met. Here's a video of Dustin presenting at phpDay 2014: Scaling PHP in the real world! Here's another interview with Dustin from OSCON 2014: Dustin Whittle (AppDynamics) Interview - OSCON 2014 Interview video!
