If I can circle this, star it, and shout it from the rooftops: if you meet someone at a meetup/conference/random coffeehouse or you Internet-meet them in HN comments or a blog discussion or whatever follow that up with an email. Even if you don't have anything to ask for, just say "Hey, it was great to meet you. We should keep in touch." Then actually keep in touch. Then, the next time you do need something, it isn't a bolt out of the blue when you show up in their inbox. (This is, naturally, reciprocal, and you should tell people that.)
This is Every Sales Occupation Ever 101, but engineers seem to have a cultural block against doing it, as if sending an acquaintance "Hey, saw your startup just raised a round / you got a new job / you had a baby. Congratulations!" is anti-social behavior if there is ever the possibility that that relationship would result in money changing hands in the future.
I have tried both Twitter 1.x and Zurb with Ruby on Rails and I found Zurb to be easier to use and have a better structure internal structure, easier to customize, etc
http://duologue.me is a new way to create and publish conversations. Think of it as a "blogging for two" where you and your friend collaborate to create new content.
It would be great to try it with ~50 beta testers at this point. Mostly to see if the idea has legs. See http://duologue.me/roadmap for more details. I'm also looking for a couple of people who want to help (RoR engineer and Designer) move this project along. The app is built with Mongo, Rails3 and Heroku.
Please drop me a line at 'zepplock (at) vova.org' if you need more information. You can also invite me (zepplock) on Duologue.me and start a conversation on subjects like RoR, APIs, Russian Literature, Reef fishtanks or whatever ;-)
PHP is an astonishingly inept language with an inexhaustible supply of WTF, but not necessarily a bad short-term career move. I think the industry might see a mini-COBOL phase as some really flaky yet successful legacy PHP needs to be maintained and finally replaced, and nobody smart wants to deal with it without being paid well. You'd definitely want to stay sharp on something better, though, both for sanity and to remain employable long-term.