I am shocked you can't get remote work with 7 years exp. Rails.
I'm even more shocked OP got a job hacking a language they haven't touched in over eight years.
Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#32Start with http://www.phptherightway.com/
I came here to say exactly this. Glad I scrolled down before creating a dupe. Seriously, this is the most helpful thing I keep coming back to. You don't have to read everything linked to here all at once; just progressively keep looking at the resources linked to here as slowly as you need to in order to understand what is going on.
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#33>Do you guys think it's acceptable if I use Arch Linux on a VM (VirtualBox) and I fullscreen the VM?
Yes. This should work provided you have a system with memory > 8GB, but you might face some issues when using a folder shared from windows. If something involves symlinks, then tread carefully. And file access to a shared folder is pretty slow too.
I am not going into how bad of an idea is going back to php since you have already considered it. But I will just say that php is every bit as bad as it was. I recommend /r/lolphp for an updated list of php gotchas...
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#34I am shocked you can't get remote work with 7 years exp. Rails.
I'm even more shocked OP got a job hacking a language they haven't touched in over eight years.
How so? It's not like OPs been working with the team in question anyway. So there's going to be a learning curve, the least of which is probably standard library/syntax changes?
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#35If it's a small shop then depending on the atmosphere being the only linux-vm guy might cause undue friction? If you are really talented then sticking out of the crowd with odd stuff might be considered as a positive characteristic but since you are not yet a PHP god I would approach the job from the point of view of learning their tools first - it's just me, though so I would not presume to give you any tactical advice.
A few things come to mind of Windows if you choose to give it a try. 1. Vim for windows works pretty well 2. It's pretty fast to switch to a different application context on windows using win-key. On windows 7 still win + 1-9 switches to the cirresponding application on task bar - and the order of applications can be reordered by dragging a mouse.
Windows nowadays is pretty solid tech but it's aimed at a general demographic so finding all the power user levers take a while. Of these:
-powershell ISE is a really nice command line (well, better than cmd) and it comes out of the box
- some people swear by automation through autohotkey scripting
- win-r is a fast way to start apps and scripts
- hitting win key and typing the name of an application is a fast way to start applucations by just the exe name
Good luck on the new job!
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#36PHP 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.
That said, if you're writing in "PHP" instead of a given set of frameworks... you're working at a company that hired someone who wrote a lot of code with no experience of what makes a good system... but you'll soon find the JS looks exactly like that too, because that's not a PHP problem.
For your OS: You can get windows analogues to all those things (in the case of vim, you can also just... use vim on windows). They offered me a mac or a windows machine where I work and I opted for mac because it's just BSD4... but like... the WM is a pile, and I wish I was using Windows98 over mac. But none of that has stopped me from making huge contributions to the team.
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#37I 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?
I am pretty new to rails, 3 years, and I haven't had any trouble finding work. Remote work is definitely not the easiest thing to find but it hasn't been that hard to find. Although I have a front end speciality which is much more in demand than traditional backend heavy developers right now.
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#38Your dev environment should ALWAYS run the exact same versions of the stack as production. With PHP, there are too many little gotchas between even minor versions.
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#39Based 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 stuck out at my job using Emacs with C# and did just fine. A lot of experienced developers have their favorite dev environment. I've never seen it used against them. I spent my own time, i.e. lunch breaks, adopting the company workflows to my dev environment.
Do you use Resharper at all?
Re: Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow
#40>Do you guys think it's acceptable if I use Arch Linux on a VM (VirtualBox) and I fullscreen the VM? Yes. This should work provided you have a system with memory > 8GB, but you might face some issues when using a folder shared from windows. If something involves symlinks, then tread carefully. And file access to a shared folder is pretty slow too. I am not going into how bad of an idea is going back to php since you…
I wouldn't say that php is every bit as bad as it was 8 years ago, its certainly made a lot of progress. There are now namespaces, generators/iterators, closures, traits, interfaces, type hinting, and with composer theres even a dependency manager. The zend engine rework coming later this year in php7 gives really promising performance boosts and some other niceties like ASTs.
Granted some (most?) of these modern php features aren't quite as nice as they are in other languages, and there is still some weirdness (/r/lolphp as you mentioned), and an inconsistently named standard library... But php has made some strides in the past 8 years. Once you're aware of the gotchas its not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.