Summary: PHP: The entire world is your development team – Beth Tucker Long Beth Tucker Long, PHP Developer and Advocate at Code Climate, and I got in front of my cameras at the 2014 PHP World conference and got to talk about her history and priorities in development, PHP, and open source; her welcome into the PHP community, the culture of sharing and teaching in PHP, her work and the mission of Code Climate ... including how she got hired as a Perl programmer right out of college and was handed a PHP codebase to fix. "So I had to learn PHP really, really fast." When she had to ask some questions the weekend she learned PHP, the welcome the PHP community gave her convinced her to stay and inspires her to this day to give other just as warm a welcome to the project. The biggest open source advantage The biggest advantage for developers in open source is also a huge advantage for businesses: "The biggest advantage for open source is that you aren't the only developer out there making sure the code is good. You have teams of developers all over the world double-checking the code, making suggestions for ways to improve it, adding features that you can use. It's like having the entire world as your development team instead of just you by yourself somewhere in an office. We don't have to know everything, we just have to know the person who does. I don't have to be an expert in every, single aspect of my field, I just have to know the experts." ... or how to search online to find them :-) On the PHP "Renaissance" Thanks to new standards, many PHP projects are now compatible with each other, leading to previously unheard of cooperation between developers from various camps within the PHP sphere. "As programmers, we've always had a tendency to make fun of anyone who is not using our specific technology or area. And lately there's been this awesome motivation to stop doing that and we're starting to learn from other languages and other technologies. It has brought about so many amazing new features in PHP and so many new things to make our lives easier. I think we're really starting to appreciate that fact. I love the fact that we're bringing more people in through this sort of renewed appreciation for outside things." Guest dossier, links and references from the interview Name: Beth Tucker Long Twitter: @e3betht Website: http://www.alittleofboth.com/ PHP Developer and Advocate at Code Climate GitHub: e3betht LinkedIn profile: Elisabeth Tucker Long Interview with Beth from the Madison PHP Conference on the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast 1st version of PHP used: PHP 3 Find your local PHP user group on php.ug (not usergroups.us as we said in the audio!) Other PHP topics we mentioned: HHVM PHPNG (aka PHP 7) Anthony Ferrara's PHP compiler, the Recki Compiler Toolkit (Recki-CT) PHP Architect and the exceptional 2014 PHP World conference Interview video Also in the Future of PHP series Future of PHP series landing page Perspectives on the future of PHP – "The Future of PHP" series intro, Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire The future of PHP ... at a distance – Lukas Kahwe Smith Composer – Dependency Management in PHP – Lorna Mitchell The Future of PHP is Shared Power Tools – Ryan Weaver PHP is getting Faster – Richard Miller PSR-What? Shared Standards for a Bright Future – Lorna Mitchell Voices of the ElePHPant / Acquia Podcast Ultimate Showdown Part 1 & Part 2 - Acquia Podcast audio/video with Cal Evans and Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire PHP: Under the Hood, Running the Web - Michelangelo van Dam A Symfony Shop Embraces...
