Brian Deshong has a new post to his site sharing some of the content (videos) from his upcoming CoderFaire Atlanta (April 20th) talk about web application performance that he's learned over his years in development.

Back in March, I gave a new talk at Atlanta PHP: "Top Ten List: PHP and Web Application Performance". This talk is a culmination of my ~14 years of experience primarily as a web application developer, but also as a systems administrator / DevOps-type. After working with PHP and web applications for so many years, I have amassed quite a few tricks for squeezing maximum performance out of web applications, PHP or otherwise.

The tips are presented by various people from around the web development (and PHP) community and relate to things like:

• Realpath cache settings
• Using offline processing
• Optimized queries
• Gzipping responses
• Caching everything
• Using a content delivery network

If you'd like to see Brian present the full talk, there's still time to get your ticket for CoderFaire - they're only $50 USD for the two day event.

Following up on his previous post about being an "agent of change" in your organization (work, open source project, etc) Matt Frost has posted his second part of the series focusing on the presentation of your ideas.

In Part 2 we're going to talk about presentation of the pitch you put together for this change. It's important that your pitch be well researched and in some regards provable, as the Agent of Change the responsibility lies with you to prove the value of your idea. As we touched on in Part 1, a well thought out plan is going to go a long way in breaking down the barriers that make change difficult to take hold.

He makes a strong point that you need to identify the problem you're trying to solve (and what solution you're wanting to propose) clearly before trying to present it to a listening audience. He recommends quantifying your solution in terms everyone can understand like "hours of work" or cost. He recommends coming up with a short "elevator pitch" version to entice and the longer version to fill in the gaps.

You've got slides, documentation, statistics and loads of other good information that is going to benefit your development process, sales people in particular are looking for that jewel that helps set your organization apart; you've got that jewel!

In his most recent post Chris Hartjes looks at the concept of "test whenever" (vs TDD) development practices and how, sometimes, writing tests for things that are may get tossed when they're done may not be the best option.

Let's look at TDD vs. Test whenever. The trade-off being made here is not about quality of code or guarding against regressions. It's about opportunity cost. This had occurred to me but I had dismissed it as being "anti-testing". But I think I was wrong, and here's why.

He talks some about a presentation from Dan North< ("Decisions, Decisions") about when to test (not whether to test or not) and how he noticed his development team was being very productive, but with a "spike and stabilize" development method. He also talks about the concept of "opportunity cost" and how it plays a factor in when tests are introduced to the process.

The key to all this is being able to identify at what stage in this particular pattern your code is at. Is it still a spike, meaning you are working out implementation details and trying to figure out if it will even have the desired result? Or is it stable, providing solid value to the application as a whole and ready to be wrapped in tests to protect against regressions?

In this latest post to his site Anthony Ferrara take a look at templating in web applications - more specifically as it deals with his experience with the Mustache templating engine.

I've been playing around with tempting engines a lot lately. For a recent project, I needed the ability to re-use the same template set in both JS and PHP (coupled with the History API, providing seamless dynamic behavior, yet still having raw content pages). Realistically today, there's only one choice for that sort of requirement: Mustache. I've learned a lot while playing with Mustache, and it's really changed my entire viewpoint on presentation layer construction.

He briefly gives an overview of "the past" of templating in PHP (including a mention of Smarty) and how templating tools - like Mustache - have helped to improve the situation, especially when it comes to the separation of presentation and processing. As an alternative, there's also a mention of the Twig templating engine in the comments, another popular option from the Symfony project.

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted a quick note about the Symfony Live Paris 2012 session videos being available online for free.

During SymfonyLive Paris 2012, we recorded all the sessions that were delivered in the two main rooms. That's a total of more than 15 hours of Symfony and PHP goodness. We promised a free access to all attendees, but we have decided to provide all the videos for free and for everyone. So, if you were not able to join us in Paris, this is a unique opportunity to watch all the great sessions we had.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Realtime Web Apps with WebSockets
• Using MongoDB responsibly
• Advanced Service Container Utilization
• Advanced Silex
• Decoupling Content Management with Create and PHPCR
• ORMs don't kill your database, developers do!

Jeff Carouth has posted some of his thoughts about the PHP micro-framework and Javascript combination (following a recent presentation on the subject).

As I mentioned, I was accepted as a speaker at LoneStarPHP 2012 to give a session on MicroPHP Framework and JavaScript Applications. The session went reasonably well and I received some decent feedback both at the conference and on joind.in. I will address a couple issues with the talk to, hopefully, inspire you as I intended with this talk.

He talks about some of the things that need fixing about his presentation (like the lack of time to get into the needed depth) and how his talk should "inspire the attendees" to create apps with this powerful combination. His goal was to describe the use of the micro-framework (Slim) as a RESTful interface into your application, not to make the application inside of it.

He also mentions that maybe making an introduction to the MicroPHP Manifesto and describing how to use a framework that applies to it in one shot might have been too much.

On the Software Development Video & Tutorial site they've shared a video that introduces the PHP to Couchbase connection from Jan Lenhardt.

Couchbase Server is a fully memcached API compatible database that solves performance, scaling and querying needs. It relies on proven technologies like memcached and Apache CouchDB along with a chunk of open source components that make the whole thing work. Couchbase developed a PHP extension to work with Couchbase Server. This video discusses the architecture of the new PHP extension and shows you how to use Couchbase Server's advanced features like views for querying with some tips and tricks when running serious deployments.

The video is a recording of a presentation he did about Couchbase itself - its features, how to get it set up, and how to use it with the Couchbase PHP library. Lots of sample code is included and there's some talk about a typical Apache/FastCGI setup to optimum support.

In this recent post from PHPMaster.com Aaron Saray gives a few helpful hints (and reasons to speak) for the aspiring presenters out there wanting to give their first talk at a PHP (or any technology-related) conference.

Your heart begins to race. Suddenly, it's stifling hot in here. Your palms begin to sweat and your knees are threatening to give up and flee to a vacation in Cancun without you. The dull rhythmic thump-thump in your ears heightens to a frenzied jack-hammer. You can't remember a time when your mouth has been this dry. It's time to begin - and your voice cracks. It's public speaking time and you're the next one up. In this article I'll cover the basics of why presenting PHP is important, who can present about PHP related topics and what you can do to make your presentation stand out.

He starts off by answering the "why" question - why even give a presentation at a conference or local user group? His answer has a few parts and involves things like giving back to the community and being considered an expert in the field. He follows this with a few ways to help your talk stand out - include code samples, give live demos and be entertaining.

In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.

Sebastian Bergmann has shared a presentation he originally gave at an Etsy event covering some of the history behind the popular PHPUnit tool and the development it's been through.

When Noah Sussman asked me to give a Code as Craft Technology Talk last week when I was consulting for Etsy I immediately said yes. [...] Just like with a talk that I gave last year, I suddenly had a chain of associations in my head that I just had to follow. And down the rabbit hole I went once more ...

He talks about the origins of PHPUnit (and mentions a few other tools), the move from PHP4 to PHP5, a change in version control from SVN to Git and features of the tool including mock objects and data providers. He also notes that not all tests are "good tests" and how, sometimes, backwards compatibility breaks are a good thing.