With a nod to this post from Cal Evans, I’m presenting my own “Top Three” posts from 2011, in order of descending popularity:

• I don’t understand the 9-to-5:
  This one is easily the tops of the popularity list…thanks to another PHP community member, this one made the front page of Hacker News for a little while and received almost five thousand hits in a day. My poor little slice didn’t know what hit it. I scrambled to put up something – anything – to be able to keep the site alive. Ultimately I ended up rendering a static version of the page to a buffer and manually refreshing it as new comments came in and were approved (39 of them!)

  The post was basically my views on developers who are genuinely interested in the work that they do and the ones that are more of the clock-in/clock-out coders that just “do the job”. There were tons of comments that both agreed and disagreed…and several that basically told me I needed to get a life or must not have kids (I have both, thankyouverymuch).

• Process Oriented versus Product Driven:
  This post was actually a quote from an interesting book on architecture and some of the things the author had learned during his time in school. This particular nugget of wisdom shows the difference between letting your work drive you and, instead, learning how to drive and shape what you do into something even better.

• How long is too long (for unit test names)?:
  This fun little post was a log of some tweets after I asked “how long is too long for a method name in a unit test”? It’s common to see things like “testValueIsValidInternalUrl” or “testUserCanExecuteTransaction” kinds of names so I wondered what other people’s experience with it was. One interesting point that came up was the use of “testdox” to translate out the name into something more readable.

These were just the most popular ones added in 2011…there’s a few others that were popular but were posted previously (like pdo+oracle and php+mq).

Hope your holidays were/are good and here’s to another great year of blogging and PHP community!

UPDATE: Besides Cal, other PHP community members are getting into the spirit – Matthew Turland, Joe Devon, Bradley Holt

I’ll admit it – I love to geek out as much as the next guy at the latest features of the PHP frameworks out there. I read the articles and tutorials every day about something awesome some framework can do (that maybe another can’t) and wish I had a place to apply it. I even find myself trying to think of new little projects so I can say I work with the latest tech. It’s an easy trap to fall into. I came to a realization earlier about frameworks, though – it’s less about the new hotness that the frameworks offer and more about what you do with them that matters.

Tech is great, don’t get me wrong – I love digging into some good code and getting my hands dirty. I love being close to the action and watching my work evolve with each reload. It’s easy to get lost in line after line of curly braces and colons and not look at the bigger picture, though. Remember as you’re doing your development – pick the right tool for the job and don’t be pulled in by the latest and greatest “just because”. Remember that the future of this language we love isn’t in the tech, but it’s in what you do with it.

If you haven’t gotten to check them out yet, be sure you listen to the webcasts from EngineYard about the future of PHP. So far they’ve covered a few of the more popular frameworks and where they’re headed, but I have it on good authority that upcoming episodes will be talking less about the “what powers it” and more about the “why it’s there” kind of topics.