For the Symfony2 meetup in Melbourne I gave a presentation on splitting a project into separate layers, why you might want to do this, how it works, what some of the downsides are, and why Symfony2 is a good fit for this.

When it comes to software development, quality is often a difficult thing to measure. Often you will be able to recognize it when you see it, but defining why something is well done is harder. Luckily there are a number of tools and standards out there that will enable you to put metrics against your code. This article shows an easy way to combine these.

Now lastly, have you ever wished to be able to step through your code, line by line, watch expressions, and even step into a function call to see why it’s producing the wrong return value?

While I don’t agree with running your development server on your Mac instead of using a Vagrant box, this is still a pretty good introduction into a very important debugging tool. Having Xdebug set up correctly can save you a lot of time and headaches, and is an actual good reason for using an IDE.
Of course, after the debugging you can continue as normal in Sublime Text, TextMate, or Vim.

Developers everywhere - PHP is not the same as it was even two years ago. Stop acting like it.

As someone who has had to deal with applications in Drupal, Magento, and similar frameworks I can only agree with Jarrod’s statements here. While those are indeed a good reason to look at PHP as something horrible, the way PHP has grown is spectacular. In fact, I believe that it the tools in the community have improved so much that it is probably quicker and faster right now to start a new project while pulling in useful tools with Composer than try to fix an existing codebase.

Via Alrayyes