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They may be “dumb”, but combined with a diligent programmer, they are powerful.

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Last night saw the very welcome return of the Tampa Bay PHP meetup, the local gathering of PHP programmers and would-be programmers in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and surrounding areas. It took place in the training room of Sourcetoad’s Tampa office (pictured below), which is also home of Tampa iOS Meetup.

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PHP is Sourcetoad’s preferred server-side programming language. I can’t think of a single current Sourcetoad project with a server application that isn’t written in PHP. As a PHP-powered software company with a long history of promoting and supporting Tampa Bay’s burgeoning tech scene, our natural impulse was to help re-ignite Tampa Bay PHP by promoting it, giving it a venue and providing food and drinks for its attendees.

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The presentation, Laravel for the PHPurist, was given by James LaChance. It was a dress rehearsal; he’ll be giving this talk at the upcoming Sunshine PHP conference. Instead of being an introduction to the Laravel framework, it was more a defense of the framework and the choices and reasoning behind its design, with particular emphasis on the Façade pattern, which it uses in abundance (see here for details on façades in Laravel).

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It was great to see the return of the Tampa Bay PHP meetup. We hope to keep seeing more of them, and we’d love to continue hosting!

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to accumulate a ridiculously large backlog of links that I’d been meaning to blog about here on Global Nerdy. It’s time for me to do some spring cleaning, so from time to time, you’ll see these posts where I unload the links that are still good, both in the sense of still being online and still being valid and useful. Enjoy!

• An open letter to app developers: It’s from 2013, but most of these suggestions to app developers on how to make apps better for everyone still apply.
• 80% of your culture is your founder. That’s the first of three lessons that this articles tries to impart. The other two are about taking that first lesson and applying it.

Coming soon: Portable computers! (1994)

• How I became the most hated person in San Francisco for a day: Before the current tech backlash against Facebook, there was this guy. Long story short: techie creates app to “disrupt” another, less prestigious, worse paying industry and wonders why people are mad at him.
• Why women leave tech: What the research says. Sue Gardner put together this Google doc a few years back, based on information from more than 200 academic studies, surveys and industry white papers, as well as roughly 25 books and about 100 news stories and analysis and opinion pieces. As we’ve seen from the likes of James Damore and by the necessity of #MeToo, not much has changed.

• Habit stacking: 17 small productivity habits. These 17 mini-habits all come from S.J. Scott’s book, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less. Most are common sense, but that’s pretty uncommon.
• How incredibly lazy people can form productive habits: It’s all about designing for laziness — making situations where it’s easier to do the right thing.
• Leading a team into the unknown: This HBR article suggests that when you’re leading a team on a project where you’re in unfamiliar territory or with a lot of unknowns, you should:
  • Set a grand challenge rather than dictating a vision
  • Design experiments rather than make decisions.
  • Don’t just ignite ideas, but prepare the organization to accept them.
  • Educate the wider organization.
  • Build expertise.
  • Don’t just give people time, but provide them with the resources to act quickly.
• The company you work for is not your friend: Yes, there are companies out there that do look out for their people. I work for one (Sourcetoad). But in most cases, while you may find a team or a manager that are your friend, to the company for whom you work, “You are a resource. That means the only one you can trust, really, is you. Here’s how to keep a cool head and stay in control of your career.”