The business side of being a developer is what to know, who to connect with, and how to sell yourself. As a technical recruiter, I have conversations with analysts, managers, and developers every day. Some are currently employed or looking for a new step in their career while others are unemployed, looking to get back to work. In addition to the job seekers, I connect with multiple companies on a daily basis that are looking to hire IT professionals for contract, contract-to-hire, and direct hire positions. Each company has their own specifics, requirements, and needs in each open position. This article will attempt to help sum up the most important factors of what employers and recruiters look for in a resume, an interview, and an overall candidate. –by Jordan Tway

Why do we write code? There once was a time when only a handful of answers to that question existed, long before our World Wide Web or the Internet Of Things. We wrote code to program accounting machines, and that was about it. No space program or aviation traffic control to talk of, nothing like a microprocessor or embedded control system and yet new companies were started day in and day out. We may write our code primarily for delivering hypermedia or for marketing and communications purposes but many more businesses are created and new markets opened than there are social networks – however do they survive? –by Benjamin Greenaway

With the rise of DDD (domain-driven development), architectures promoting domain-centric designs are becoming more popular. This is the case with Hexagonal Architecture, also known as Ports and Adapters, that seems to have been rediscovered recently by PHP developers. Invented in 2005 by Alistair Cockburn, one of the Agile Manifesto authors, the Hexagonal Architecture allows an application to be equally driven by users, programs, automated tests, or batch scripts, while being developed and tested in isolation from its eventual run-time devices and databases. This results in infrastructure-agnostic web applications that are easier to test, write, and maintain. Let’s see how to apply it using real PHP examples. –by Carlos Buenosvinos

Data validation is a really important part of any application because it ensures the usefulness of our data. Data always needs to be validated before it is persisted into a database or passed to a web service. There are multiple libraries written in PHP which can help us to accomplish this task, but in this article, we are going to learn how to use the Symfony Validation Component, stand-alone, and see how powerful it is. –by Gabriel García Fernández

There are two ways we might receive a larger flow of data than we’re expecting. Both can cause a denial of service from exhausting resources. The first is because a user is just extremely passionate or excited about our service and is over-using it. The second is from malicious intent. –by Aaron Saray

In this month’s Education Station, I’m taking a slightly different track. Instead of catering to the entire PHP community, I want to give a bit of a shout out, a bit of love, a bit of time, to those of us doing it potentially a bit tougher than others. I’m talking about those living life out on the edge — the freelance developers.
–by Matt Setter

Archie is making his world-wide debut this month. Check back each month to see where else Archie has been spotted.–by Archie

Last month, I wrote about how we are asking too much of our programmers these days – requiring them all to be full stack experts ranging from the bare system up to doing JavaScript and CSS. This month, however, I want to argue the counter-point. While it’s true that we shouldn’t require that someone do all these things as part of their regular job duties … I do think that it’s good (nigh important) for us to encourage developers to know as much as they can. –by Eli White

PHP has long had the reputation of being a “side project”, something people played with in their free time or for personal use. Even though we haven’t fully shaken this reputation, PHP has come into its own and is being taken very seriously in the enterprise around the world. This makes PHP developers a hot commodity in the job market. There are contract jobs and full-time jobs, junior and senior positions – a wealth of opportunities. –by Beth Tucker Long