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Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

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Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#61

Post by grover_hartmann »

mauricemir wrote: post #52
akg_67 wrote: post #21

Based on your post, my concern is that you will stick out as a "sore thumb" insisting on using Arch Linux in a Windows shop. Basically, you are signaling to your employer and coworkers that you will be difficult to work with. Please spend first 90 days building a good reputation and impression for yourself with your supervisor and coworkers and later use your reputation to drive any changes. By insisting on using Arc…

They are developing in PHP and don't develop on Linux?

Yes, they use Windows and Sublime Text to write PHP code.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#62

Post by mathgeek »

bdg wrote: post #36

PHP is quite possibly one of the best languages to use for a project these days. The community is massive and full of people who are deeply passionate about best practices. There are more quality frameworks than you can hope to keep up with (if your ranking of quality is the meager toy that rails is, you'll be happy here). The frameworks are really good at abstracting away the awful API choices the language makes. Th…

> I wish I was using Windows98 over mac.

You can always install Windows via Boot Camp. There's little reason to even have this kind of discussion these days.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#63

Post by RossM »

Politically and practically, I'd suggest you use Windows and their tooling to start with. When you're getting started they'll likely need to help you get setup and that's going to be difficult for them if you're using other tools. Later on, you can make more informed decisions about switching tools after getting familiar with their applications.

If they run production on Windows as well, there are likely bits of the software that won't be cross-platform (file paths, encodings are common ones). We have a mix at our shop (Windows, OSX and Linux) and I think we only get away with it due to everyone knowing what to avoid (through experience). We still step on each other's toes occasionally. It wouldn't look good if you spent a lot of time at the start fixing things just to get it to work on your platform.

I think Sublime has a vim mode (or plugin) that should give you similar keybindings and it has panes a bit like vim.

As to getting back to PHP, some good links have already been posted. Get up to date on Composer and PHPUnit, look at whatever framework they're using and build some demo apps on it.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#64

Post by crispy770 »

I work at a Windows shop and have a few coworkers who prefer linux. I run Debian at home and occassionally need to help the non windows guys with windows specific issues. What's important is that you are able to produce as much on a non windows environment as a windows environment, and that you don't have to tap resources in order to do so.

Whether you run in a vm, whether it's windows, osx, arch-linux, gnome, mint, etc is really just semantic.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#66

Post by mauricemir »

brianwawok wrote: post #57
mauricemir wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen brother/sister. You should ALWAYS be working on a dev server set up identically to the test and live servers. At one place we insisted on having machines from the same production run and ideally all the DASD (disks) would be from the same batch.

Eh. Sometimes variety is nice. Exposes some new bugs sometime. If your tools are sane, dev how you want.

Sorry if your developing software professionally you DO NOT take risks like that.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#68

Post by mauricemir »

grover_hartmann wrote: post #59
mauricemir wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your developing on individual developers machines - you need to change jobs Stat!

I'm developing on the company's machines. Why would that be a problem? They created an account for me on the Windows machines. I'm on my way to set up an Arch VM.

With all due respect You really don't understand the difference between a development server and your personal PC - How many years experience did you say you had?

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#69

Post by davelnewton »

mauricemir wrote: post #68
grover_hartmann wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm developing on the company's machines. Why would that be a problem? They created an account for me on the Windows machines. I'm on my way to set up an Arch VM.

With all due respect You really don't understand the difference between a development server and your personal PC - How many years experience did you say you had?

Why the attitude? If it's a simple definition problem there's no need to get snippy, just address the issue and move on.

Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

#70

Post by rcconf »

akg_67 wrote: post #21

Based on your post, my concern is that you will stick out as a "sore thumb" insisting on using Arch Linux in a Windows shop. Basically, you are signaling to your employer and coworkers that you will be difficult to work with. Please spend first 90 days building a good reputation and impression for yourself with your supervisor and coworkers and later use your reputation to drive any changes. By insisting on using Arc…

I don't think this is good advice. If I switched to Windows, it would take me significantly longer to get my environment setup in a way that is useful to me. I'm spending more time tweaking my environment than actually coding.

At the company I work for, we have people on Windows, and we have people on OSX. We've never had a problem with it. Our build scripts are agnostic because we deploy to Linux anyways. If someone doesn't have a piece of software on a specific OS, we just run it on a VM.

I just can't think of a good reason to why you would need to switch to Windows in a PHP environment. I think it might be understandable if you work on a platform that forces you to run a specific operating system (like specific game engines), but I doubt he'll have any issues doing PHP dev on a Linux machine and switching to a different OS is just going to slow him down.

I assume the reason the company is not allowing you to run on metal is so they can install company software to monitor and install software updates on your machine, not because of the development environment associated with PHP.

I wouldn't switch my OS for a company unless the work absolutely requires it. My environment is highly automated for OSX and I can get up and running in under an hour. All my software is installed automatically, I have set directories where websites live and nginx is already configured to run from those directories.

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