So you want to be a PHP Developer?

http://dannynunez.com/want-to-be-a-php-developer/

by JeremyMorgan • 12 years ago

38 63 12 years ago

dannynunez.com

JeremyMorgan• 12 years ago

One of my favorite parts:

Unicorn Skills That will be required – (Some how through magic)

bshimmin• 12 years ago

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again!

Maakuth• 12 years ago

I for one needed to Google it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines): Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

8draco8• 12 years ago

Simply add "why" or "how" on the beginning of sentence i.e. Why you want to be PHP developer? In marketing they are calling them "open questions", the question to which you have to answer with more than just yes or no

KhalPanda2• 12 years ago

It strikes me as more of a rhetorical question/could have just as easily been ended with an ellipsis.

But yeah... ha-ha. :)

Daviey• 12 years ago

Ah, but this is a question i am pleased to say 'No' to. x

alexbilbie• 12 years ago

This list fails to mention http://www.phptherightway.com/

dutchbrit5• 12 years ago

I wouldn't recommend Zend (I find it rather resource heavy) - but rather Laravel or Symphony, CodeIgniter is also nice and extremely easy to learn - probably the lowest entry level that I can think of, but 2.0 is taking it's sweet time to come along so that's a huge downside, plus, Ellislab wants to sell the project...

Regarding CMS work, I have personally found that Magento is one of the best things to specialise in. Ecommerce is a huge market.

babuskov2• 12 years ago

I agree. Learn CodeIgniter first because it is easy. Once you create a couple of projects with CI, switch to Laravel (or Yii framework). CI is really good to get a grasp on MVC way of thinking, and learning Laravel later will make you appreciate all the features is has (and CI is missing).

JonoBB2• 12 years ago

No, don't even think of learning CodeIgniter. Besides being pretty much dead (version 3 has been coming out for, what, about 2 years now?), it has terrible architecture. The superglobal singleton is just awful and will kill you slowly.

ZoFreX2• 12 years ago

This. I don't understand why CodeIgniter gets mentioned in the same breath as Zend or Symphony, or any other fully-fledged framework. CI is, to start with, much smaller: it's tiny, the sort of thing you could knock out in a week. It also has deep-rooted architectural issues that are preventing some of the longest standing bugs being fixed (for example, take a look at the router). Lastly it's not anywhere near as modular as it purports to be, and the code and architecture quality is rather poor.

krumiro79• 12 years ago

Even though CodeIgniter is indeed an easy framework to start with, I would not recommend it as it's quite an old concept and it's not being developed anymore. Laravel is more recent and not too difficult if you follow the nice docs. There's also plenty of nice articles online (especially in Tutsplus - code.tutsplus.com/search?utf8=✓&view=&search%5Bkeywords%5D=laravel&button=).

dscrd• 12 years ago

What you mean by resource heavy? Symphony at least is one of the heaviest frameworks, and not just for PHP.

dutchbrit5• 12 years ago

I haven't used Symphony personally but always thought it was less heavy, I stand corrected!

onion2k• 12 years ago

There's a lot of money in Magento because it's so utterly horrible to work with.

dutchbrit5• 12 years ago

Indeed, it has a steep learning curve. I have been working with Magento from day 1, and I'm still learning new things. But additionally, another main reason why it pays more, is that the client is willing to pay more + will actively pay for updates since it's not just a regular boring website, but an actual online business.

troels• 12 years ago

Resource heavy? That's not the problem with ZF. The problem with ZF is that is was designed by committee. And it is built in a very class-centric style. Symfony also has a much larger community around it.

EGreg• 12 years ago

How about http://platform.qbix.com ? Shameless plug.

shoq• 12 years ago

Chrome 35.0.1916.153 Contribute: Need to define QP/contribute/response/column1 Need to define QP/contribute/response/column2

Features: The "You will just have to try it yourself."-Button is not doing anything.

n0body2• 12 years ago

no, because i'm a perl developer, and perl is php's big brother

n0body2• 12 years ago

haters gonna hate

nodesocket• 12 years ago

Recommend the Flight (http://flightphp.com/learn) framework for creating RESTful APIs in PHP. It is lightweight, flexible, and does routing nicely.

darthdeus• 12 years ago

Why would I want to be a PHP developer? :O

hackerboos• 12 years ago

Because it still pays and if you are good at it - pays well.

dirtyphpdev• 12 years ago

Because finding a job is incredibly easy. Because it pays well if you know your stuff. Because you don't have to work with people who will judge you based on something as in-significant as what programming language you decide to use.

alkonaut2• 12 years ago

"PHP-elitist" is an oxymoron, right? Like a dumpster-foodie or an instant-coffee aficionado?

morgante• 12 years ago

I submit to you dumpster foodies: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/37/28/dtg-dumpster-dini...

alkonaut2• 12 years ago

There you go! There's a person (and programming language) for every taste...

stephenr• 12 years ago

Stating that disliking/hating the mess that is wordpress makes someone an elitist is stupid and sounds like an apologist to me.

Would you call someone a ruby elitist because they embraced best practices and disliked/hated a project that refuses to embrace best practices and encourages bad practices?

rimantas• 12 years ago

That comment is also under joomla, which is even worse than WP.

waitingkuo• 12 years ago

No, as a full stack web developer, I use node.js so that I don't need to switch between js and php frequently.

KhalPanda2• 12 years ago

TIL: Symfony has a high learning curve.

adamors2• 12 years ago

This is a rather low effort post. PHP The Right Way [1] already covers the basics of modern PHP, without turning into a laundry list.

Today the most important thing is Composer, not frameworks, especially to those who are just starting out. Learning a full framework is pointless if they just want to see the basics in action. Fabien Potencier's Create your own framework series [2] is really good for this: it shows how much you can do with just a couple of Symfony components and a front controller.

[1] http://www.phptherightway.com/

[2] http://fabien.potencier.org/article/53/create-your-own-frame...

krapp• 12 years ago

This is certainly also the most important thing for existing PHP developers still hanging on to the "old" way of writing PHP code. Having worked on sites where everything is an undocumented mess of manual multi-level includes with shared globals and half-baked implementations of things which already exist, in a better form, well tested and documented elsewhere, I feel like I need to shout from the rooftops php has a package manager! f_ing use it! and url routers are a thing now!

It really is surpising how far you can get with a little effort now in PHP, and how much suffering you can avoid by just letting go (of what, admittedly, makes the language fun for some - it's raw, ugly, stupid simple quick-and-dirty hackability) and embracing structure. And open source code.

ZoFreX2• 12 years ago

If you're going down the Drupal route you're just as likely to need Drupal 6 - one of the challenges in this market is there is a lot of legacy work to be done, so you often have to know two or three versions of the framework.

In the "Unicorn skills" section, you're as likely to need cPanel or Plesk as pure Linux skills (although having the latter will make the former much easier). I would also say you'll probably be using SVN and not git. Lastly, add FTP and SSH to the skills you'll need.

jammycakes• 12 years ago

I would also say you'll probably be using SVN and not git.

According to http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/php.do these are the number of PHP jobs asking for Git and Subversion respectively in the UK in the past six months:

Git: 2244 jobs Subversion: 1559 jobs

So no, you're actually more likely to be asked for Git than SVN.

ASneakyFox• 12 years ago

Being that both are popular and it's common to see both, you really ought to know both.

shire2• 12 years ago

is it easy to find job in the PHP world? and does it even pay good comparing to other languages like Ruby or Python

imaginenore2• 12 years ago

Yes, pretty easy.

chx• 12 years ago

Drupal: Pros:

Low Learning Curve Cons:

Oversaturated Job Market

I will be the first to admit that Drupal does not have a low learning curve. (And you can blame me for some of that. Or a lot of that if you wish :P)

But oversaturated job market?? There has been a shortage of good developers ever since there was such a thing as Drupal-developer-as-a-job, at least a decade.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

Agreed. Any Drupal developer who is having a hard time finding work, come to DC. There are over a dozen shops hiring Drupal devs right now.

coffeecheque• 12 years ago

Does anyone have any good "tick-offs" that you'd ideally have to meet before you could be classified as a PHP Dev?

I had a look at the Zend certification link, and I know most of things on the list. It was surprising, because I wouldn't classify myself as a "dev" or anything even close to it. I learnt (and use) PHP via the "hack and see" method.

imaginenore2• 12 years ago

Drupal absolutely does NOT have a low learning curve. If you want to do anything beyond a basic configuration blog-style site, good luck finding developers who know how to deal with Drupal's internals, especially in the last version.

mreiland• 12 years ago

I was wondering at that too, but I don't have experience with some of the other frameworks so I thought perhaps it was just all relative :)

I love Drupal, despite some of the flack it gets, I think on the whole it does what it does really well. But easy to get into "it aint".

wiseleo• 12 years ago

Not to mention how there is no backward compatibility. That's what made me abandon that platform.

leorocky• 12 years ago

A big suggestion missing here is a CS degree. I like Steve Yegge's take on it[1]:

The best tip is: go get a computer science degree. The more computer science you have, the better. You don't have to have a CS degree, but it helps. It doesn't have to be an advanced degree, but that helps too.

My own take on it is that most programming languages are like cars and the skill of driving computer science: if you can drive one car, you can learn to drive the other and with programming if you can program in one language you can probably program in the other. Knowing the fundamentals about computers, how information is represented as bits, how they store and process information, how they communicate over networks, how you can use them to solve problems like sorting, cache invalidation, etc is really important stuff that is orthogonal to learning a programming language. Personally if I am using programming language X at my job, and you have 0 experience with it, but are a good programmer, I may not give a shit and hire you anyways.

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/03/get-that-job-at-googl...

neurobro• 12 years ago

Congrats to the author on breaking the stupidly absurd font-size world record!

MrSelection4• 12 years ago

So anyone in here can give me a opinion, how i can improve myself as a worthy developer.. I am 22 years old fresh graduate and a ruby developer with currently 1 year experience, before i have learn node.js(express), php(cms, news site), db(sql,nosql)... but i got a feel(*is it true?) that america, europe is getting a worthed salary as a programmer they are valued rather than here in my country i got around $6000/year with living cost $3600/year this is really a standart in my country. its really hurt me, so as a fellow programmer here can you guys give me a suggestion to improve my living?how bout emigrate?

juergen• 12 years ago

where do you live currently?

MrSelection4• 12 years ago

Well i am in indonesia..

DCoder• 12 years ago

An alternative to emigrating could be finding a local company working on projects for foreign clients. For example, I live in Eastern Europe and work for a company that deals 99% with clients from Denmark (Central Europe). I make significantly more than the average worker here does. Just be careful and make sure the company values quality and best practices over a quick buck.

rabino• 12 years ago

Also, this: https://github.com/ziadoz/awesome-php

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

Drupal 8 incorporates quite a bit of Symfony, so learning Symfony starting now will probably open some Drupal doors in a year or two when 8 is stable and being heavily used.

shire2• 12 years ago

What's the best of learning a CMS or Framework? or which one should a beginner start with and how can I go about the first steps?

So you want to be a PHP Developer?

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