I beat PHP and so can you!

By request from Bill Martin, an abridged history of my relationship with
the bastard child of programming languages, PHP.

Ahh PHP. I love it. I hate it.

For well over a decade, I slung PHP day and night. I got into PHP at the tail
end of version 3. Prior to that, I was working with Perl (cgi-bin, much?) and
ASP (pre-.NET).

Why PHP? Pretty simple, really. Perl just wasn’t my cup of tea and anything was
better than some closed sourced Microsoft nonsense.

PHP was my hammer, my screwdriver and my saw. Sometimes it was even
the nails, too! There wasn’t much I couldn’t do with PHP.

That’s not to say that I have never dabbled with other languages. I try to pick
the right tool for the job. Often times that was PHP but other times it was
Python or Ruby.

During that time, I had written and released some moderately successful PHP
packages
and even built my own PHP framework called
PICKLES. The original concepts for the framework predate WordPress.

Yes, there was a time before WordPress.

PHP was the language that not only helped me pay the bills, but was also my
language of choice for my side projects.

My ability to build sites in PHP that generate revenue is why I still defend PHP
or any language for that matter.

It doesn’t matter what language you use as long as you have users and/or it
makes money.

So if PHP has done me so well, why do I say that I beat PHP?

Because I did beat it. After 15 years of being a PHP developer by trade, I
pursued my dream job at Sumo, a predominantly Node.js shop.

I actually didn’t have a ton of Node.js experience at the time. I had built a
chat system in it when Node.js was only a few years old and a static site
affiliate thing with Justin the year prior to taking the opportunity.

Too my earlier point, both of those endeavors had users and made money 😉

So just over 2 years ago, I got out of my comfort zone and started to sling
Node.js full time.

No regrets.

It was something I had seen my buddies Daver and Dean do over
the years. They both jump languages every few years and I always thought that
they were missing out on becoming experts with any particular language.

Thing is, it has nothing to do with the language, it has everything to do with
the programmer and their ability to pick up on the syntax. An expert programmer
tends to transcend the language itself.

So here we are, two years deep into Node.js and I’m feeling fairly proficient.

I still run a couple of sites that are built on PHP. No benefit to rewriting
them for the sake of it.

More than likely, I’ll always have a PHP site or two laying around. New stuff
will probably be in Node.js until I finally get swayed over to Golang or
something even more hipster and/or esoteric.

Would I change anything about sticking with PHP so long?

Absolutely not. My time doing PHP was less about the PHP and more about the
people I had met and worked with and the companies that I helped build and to
succeed.

For me, that’s the stuff that matters.

Just so it’s not false advertising, I did mention that you can beat PHP too.

Well you can, just need to be confident in your development abilities, not your
PHP ones. In fact, I’ve found it’s better to make light of the fact that you do
PHP. Some folks will look down upon it and a little bit of self-depricating
humor is good medicine 😉

And if you’re in the market and looking for a change, we’re hiring for a
number of roles, not just in development!

Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


If you found this article helpful, please consider buying me a coffee.