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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

#11

Post by joemaller1 »

PHP isn't as bad as it used to be. Yes fundamental operator order is erratic and I'm forever googling basic functions, but the ecosystem has produced some good stuff over the past couple years.

Read up on Composer and Packagist. It's basically NPM, Gems, or PyPi for PHP. There are now solid interoperable libraries for most common tasks.

- https://getcomposer.org

- https://packagist.org

Laravel is a great framework, but quite a bit of what's out there seems to be built on the Symfony foundation.

- http://laravel.com

- http://symfony.com

There are also great coding guidelines and tools that are evolving. The PHP Framework Interoperability Group has produced some solid coding standards and tooling has followed.

- http://www.php-fig.org

WordPress...it makes me sad. But it's ubiquitous. If you're stuck doing WP work, take a look at the Roots project. It's a sane, modern approach with good tooling.

- https://roots.io

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

#12

Post by minot »

joshstrange wrote: post #10

Quick rundown (in no particular order): * The language has comes leaps and bounds since you last used it * Install composer and learn how to use it (PHP package manager) * Read up on Laravel, IMHO it's the best PHP Framework out there right now. They guy behind it is a genius and has great vision for it. * You'll want to use nginx + php5-fpm (No more apache and php_mod) * Check our PHPStorm, if you are going to use a…

As a satisfied PHPstorm user, I'd like to say that the parent probably meant beat when they wrote bear

> if you are going to use an IDE you can't bear intelij

if you are going to use an IDE you can't beat intelij. They are also the people behind resharper.

Readers, if you are a student, please check out https://www.jetbrains.com/student/

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

#14

Post by gtirloni »

joemaller1 wrote: post #11

PHP isn't as bad as it used to be. Yes fundamental operator order is erratic and I'm forever googling basic functions, but the ecosystem has produced some good stuff over the past couple years. Read up on Composer and Packagist. It's basically NPM, Gems, or PyPi for PHP. There are now solid interoperable libraries for most common tasks. - https://getcomposer.org - https://packagist.org Laravel is a great framework, b…

I've been called a few times to troubleshoot slow PHP websites only to discover they were using Symfony and could not sustain 5req/sec on fairly beefy hardware. All kinds of PHP optimizations couldn't make it run much faster (which complicated the infrastructure a lot later on). The last time was 1 year ago so unless something impressive happened since then, I would suggest against it.

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

#15

Post by CamTin »

Don't worry. PHP itself shouldn't be an issue. It's bog standard ALGOL-y syntax with some weird corner cases that aren't that hard to avoid.

The bigger gotcha will be getting used to the execution model, if it's standard LAMP-y type application hacking. Remember that, in this style of app, all of your state has to be either explicitly stored in a backend or in the browser cookies. The script begins not knowing anything, lives briefly, excreting HTML or JSON, and then dies, leaving behind only what it's explicitly saved. In some ways it's more complex than a Rails-type model, and in others it's simpler.

In any case, you should be up to speed in a week or two of hacking at it full time.

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

#16

Post by grover_hartmann »

What about the fact that they all are using Windows on the desktop? I'm a Linux person and I can't use anything else. I've been using Linux for 15 years.

I asked if they can let me install Linux on the computers, they said I have to use a VM.

I'm fine with a VM but I also need my window manager of choice (i3-wm) and so on.

Would it be okay if I install Arch Linux on VirtualBox and I fullscreen the VM? What about performance then?

All the other developers are using Windows and putty shells and Sublime Text as their editor.

I asked if I could bring my own laptop but they said I can't.

Suggestions welcome.

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

#17

Post by getsat »

>They said I have to use a VM. They also mentioned I can't bring my own hardware.

>Suggestions welcome.

Keep looking for a new job. I guarantee this is the tip of the nightmare iceberg you're about to hit.

I hope I am wrong, but I've seen this enough times before to know that I'm probably not.

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

#18

Post by zizee »

fowkswe wrote: post #13
gargarplex wrote: post #5

I am shocked you can't get remote work with 7 years exp. Rails.

This was my thought. I'm happily employed so I haven't been looking, but are others finding that Rails work is drying up as well?

Curious to know where the original poster is located?

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

#19

Post by eli »

CamTin wrote: post #15

Don't worry. PHP itself shouldn't be an issue. It's bog standard ALGOL-y syntax with some weird corner cases that aren't that hard to avoid. The bigger gotcha will be getting used to the execution model, if it's standard LAMP-y type application hacking. Remember that, in this style of app, all of your state has to be either explicitly stored in a backend or in the browser cookies. The script begins not knowing anythi…

Aren't there pretty popular PHP frameworks that take care of magic like parsing variables and routing URLs and persisting state?

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

#20

Post by eli »

grover_hartmann wrote: post #16

What about the fact that they all are using Windows on the desktop? I'm a Linux person and I can't use anything else. I've been using Linux for 15 years. I asked if they can let me install Linux on the computers, they said I have to use a VM. I'm fine with a VM but I also need my window manager of choice (i3-wm) and so on. Would it be okay if I install Arch Linux on VirtualBox and I fullscreen the VM? What about perf…

Have you actually tried VirtualBox? Depending on the underlying hardware, the performance really might not be an issue.
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