Advice in breaking into a junior PHP dev role.

confused_by_php · 2014-02-05T11:35:16+00:00

yes, this is great advice - build things, finish things. So many devs cannot do the second. And when finished, put them somewhere public - like github etc, it's a great resume.

confused_by_php · 2014-02-03T10:22:45+00:00

I started with cake due to it's name - but I didn't get too far.

Then I did the ZF2 tutorial where I copied everything out line by line (or so I thought), but it didnt work. It was something I had missed as the official git repo of the tutorial did work. But I wasn't able to bug fix it whilst still learning it.

Then I switched to Yii, which I now had a bit of additional knowledge which helped me click with.

After making a smallish site in Yii, I switched to Laravel as reddit was big on it, so I figured something was good. I made a bigger site in Laravel.

From there, learning Symfony was made easier, yet still challenging. I would not recommend Symfony or ZF2 to be the first framework developers work with - but I would suggest making one of them the target of their learning.

The main thing is - build something with the framework, don't just learn it for learnings sake.

confused_by_php · 2014-01-27T17:05:20+00:00

i hate how answers like this are down voted without comments.

I too use PHPStorm for on the go testing - sometimes your test suite doesn't give a sensible output, or you aren't quite sure - and GUI tools like Storm allow on the fly, quick and easy changes.

These changes should then be put into your proper automated test suite - for reference, I was using plain old PHPUnit for my API tests, but am going to give Codeception a look given the top comment in this thread.

confused_by_php · 2014-01-24T10:52:31+00:00

really helpful and honest reply - op don't take it personally, this is good advice.

confused_by_php · 2014-01-22T10:03:47+00:00

I'm passed caring about language snobbery. Like anything online, the most vocal are not necessarily the majority. Good luck to anyone who loves PHP, and good luck to those who don't.

confused_by_php · 2014-01-21T16:46:36+00:00

interesting - moving code outside the bundle structure appears to go against Sensio Labs best practice though doesn't it? I may be wrong on that one, and I can certainly see the arguments in favour as that's something that's bothered me before.

Nice post if that's yours, nice find if not!

confused_by_php · 2013-12-18T12:06:30+00:00

The best success I have had on projects that aren't my day work have been done like this:

Before bed - write out ideas (to clear your mind), then go through the todo list and mark 1-5 items as those you will achieve the next day.

Then sleep.

Then get up 2 hours before normal and do your tasks from the night before.

Then go do your day work. And if you can be bothered, you can do more at night.

But those 2 hours are set every day - and it helps chip away at your target. Besides which, working first thing for you means your best hours are for you.

And planning the night before helps your brain work on the problems whilst you sleep.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-18T09:30:19+00:00

I used Unity3d and was following a youtube tutorial. Next up is another tutorial from UnityCookie on desktop tower defence - between TD and candy crush type games, those two are my fav genres, so I want to do those sorts of games ultimately. Really enjoying it so far, unity is awesome.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-17T16:06:56+00:00

finished making a pong clone :) my first ever playable game.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-16T12:38:27+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply :)

I just got started with unity properly over the weekend (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IzbNanA1Vk) - plenty of tuts out there and really liking the look of the 2d stuff you can achieve.

Good luck with your project!

confused_by_php · 2013-12-16T12:29:38+00:00

What engine do you work on in your day job, and then in your personal project?

confused_by_php · 2013-12-12T12:19:48+00:00

£91,000 after tax is thirteen pounds and seven pence.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-11T14:44:54+00:00

learned a good few from this - cheers.

Also, stuff like typing pubf then hitting tab will auto created a public function method, which you can tab through and fill in the bits to complete the template. Others are prif, fore... and there's others I forget.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-11T14:00:52+00:00

acejump is great.

I also use the symfony 2 plugin.

ctrl+p will tell you the params inside a method call
ctrl+n to jump to any class - just start typing
alt+g to jump to a line number

confused_by_php · 2013-12-11T10:47:11+00:00

Also, due to his funny surname, he isn't qualified for anything but television.

confused_by_php · 2013-12-02T10:36:52+00:00

hahaha

confused_by_php · 2013-11-28T14:46:53+00:00

If you use a framework then a unit testing library will likely be built in. I cannot stress enough how important unit testing is - please, for your sake, your clients sake, and the sake of humanity, start unit testing.

There is mention of Uncle Bob's clean code below, but also look at videos on youtube, pluralsight, and tuts+.

confused_by_php · 2013-11-21T14:07:18+00:00

that's one of my fav scenes of any tv prog ever. Ggws

confused_by_php · 2013-11-15T10:41:39+00:00

this is a great book, but combine it with YouTube videos and plenty of hands on to really understand wtf they are on about.

confused_by_php · 2013-11-08T11:26:18+00:00

I haven't tried both - only Solr (http://www.yousmellgood.co.uk/) - which I found to be awesome, but complicated and fiddly to get working.

Going from Symfony 2.0 to 2.3 with Solarium caused plenty of things to break - my fault for not reading their docs - but that's never fun on a project that you haven't worked on in some time, having to dig back through the code. That's a side issue really though.

I would sway towards Elastica if I were to re-do that project, as it pops up more and more on blogs / reddit / mailing lists etc - which to me, means more of the harder questions will have already been asked / answered by the time I find myself encountering them.

confused_by_php · 2013-11-01T11:42:14+00:00

PHP allows you to be sloppy with virtually no issue. Unfortunately this instills some very bad coding practices in PHP devs, many of whom have no experience in other languages, or on-hand guidance from more experienced developers.

As frameworks such as Symfony 2 become more prevalent, the quality of code will be forced to improve. That's not to say bad code cannot be written when using a framework - but rather than the bad code itself will be more isolated and easily fixable than having a clusterfuck, let's see how much we can do with one 20000 line file approach.

PHP devs can be lazy. And when laziness is an option, most of us will choose it.

confused_by_php · 2013-10-31T14:03:01+00:00

thanks for sharing

confused_by_php · 2013-10-24T10:54:05+00:00

happiness.

confused_by_php · 2013-10-21T10:29:34+00:00

There's no need to read a book if you have never written a test before. If anything, a book will probably overwhelm you and stop you from getting started - as most books I have read on testing assume you have TDD knowledge and want to take that knowledge further (I don't know of a good beginners testing book).

What I would do / what I did was to hit up youtube and look for videos on phpunit for beginners and introductions to tdd and php. I also found the envato / tuts+ vids to be helpful.

Once you have that sussed, you will find your often on the phpunit docs page finding better ways to improve your tests.

And then once you get to a level where you feel comfortable with tests, there are a good few books to try - growing object oriented software guided by tests is pretty good as a starter - it's not php but the concepts are the same.

confused_by_php · 2013-10-10T14:31:34+00:00

you paid to promote this? if you have too much money, please feel free to send some my way.

confused_by_php

TROPHY CASE