{"id":613,"date":"2010-08-05T09:09:27","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T15:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=613"},"modified":"2010-08-05T09:09:27","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T15:09:27","slug":"musings-on-php-development-as-a-career-path","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/613","title":{"rendered":"Musings on php development as a career path"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was at a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tedxboulder.com\/\">TedXBoulder<\/a> preparty last night.\u00a0 Ran into some really interesting folks&#8211;the usual tech folks, but also Charles, a high flying audio engineer (we&#8217;re talking Wembley stadium), Emily, a money manager bizdev lady ($30 million, minimum, please) and Donna, an engineer on leave from a big aerospace firm who is interested in entrepreneurialism.\u00a0 Really looking forward to the talks on Saturday (tickets apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tedxboulder.com\/tickets\/\">still available<\/a>).\u00a0 I also ran into an <a href=\"http:\/\/brian.pontarelli.com\">old friend, roommate and colleague<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We chatted about a wide variety of topics, but one stuck out in my mind.\u00a0 His brother is getting back into software development, and is starting out doing a lot of php.\u00a0 Fair enough&#8211;it&#8217;s a great language, I&#8217;ve done a fair bit of it, and one can write good, maintainable, fase code with it.\u00a0 But last night, we agreed that if you don&#8217;t want to be competing against, how do I say this politely, the lowest common denominator, it is wise to develop your software dev skills elsewhere, into one of three paths.\u00a0 I thought it&#8217;d make a good blog post.\u00a0 As I see it, the three options are<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a compiled language&#8211;C#, Java, c, erlang: these tend to be used by large companies<\/li>\n<li>a sexy dynamic language&#8211;Ruby, javascript (especially server side), groovy, python, clojure, lisp: my feeling is that these are more used by startups<\/li>\n<li>particular packages in php&#8211;magento, drupal: these are often more configuration than coding, but can be customized to produce astonishingly powerful applications<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The end goal, to be clear, is not to avoid php, but just to avoid competing against developers who are likely to undercut you.\u00a0 For example, I knew of someone, in the US, who was doing contract php work for $18\/hr a few years ago.\u00a0 I just don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s someone with whom you want to be competing for business (I certainly don&#8217;t!).\u00a0 Following one of the above career development paths will help you avoid that.\u00a0 I personally have followed the first and third paths, with some dabbling in the second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was at a TedXBoulder preparty last night.\u00a0 Ran into some really interesting folks&#8211;the usual tech folks, but also Charles, a high flying audio engineer (we&#8217;re talking Wembley stadium), Emily, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17,6],"tags":[45,44,46],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jobs","category-php","category-programming","tag-career-development","tag-php-2","tag-tedxboulder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":617,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions\/617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}