Hi and welcome to my blog :)

Ever since I got started with web development I wanted to have my own blog that would be focused on programming.

Many times I have been in a situation where I was stuck at some point with project I was working on and usually I could find a solution on some blog. Of course, there are other ways you can give something back to the community, but I think blog is still a good way to share a solution or a story.

I also think that only by sharing knowledge we can truly embrace what we learned from experience.

PHP

Since I began taking web development seriously, PHP programming language was my main point of interest.

I think PHP has some good sides, such as easiness to learn and set up, scalability and large community. There are also some bad sides, inconsistent core function names and argument order being among them as well as some unexpected behaviour with type casting.

With all it’s pros and cons, I must say I love being a part of PHP community.

I am enjoying language’s journey from something that’s easy to install on any web server and to work with to a mature language where all popular programming practices have been adopted. Test driven development is definitely one of those practices I would like to see become more accepted in PHP world.

Magento

Having been one of the most popular programming languages for quite some time, PHP has formed a lot of “sub communities” that are formed around language frameworks or open source projects. The one I mostly worked with for the last few years is Magento—an ecommerce platform.

What I liked about Magento when I started is its detail oriented approach and robust architecture. The fact that any part could be easily modified in an unobtrusive way was appealing to me.

The community is also very large and willing to help, meaning one can easily find information on any Magento related topic.

However, Magento’s codebase is not perfect and six years after it’s launch its time for a new release, so everyone is looking closely at Magento 2 on Github.

Other stuff

There are also some other great things going on in PHP community, such as the Symfony framework with it’s modular and extensible philosophy.
One of the projects based on Symfony I keep an eye on is the Sylius project, which is an ecommerce platform in pre-alpha development stage that looks very promising.

I also like taking part in coding challenges, the one I like the most is phpgolf.
It’s a competition where you need to solve a problem with the shortest possible code using php.

So, drop by sometimes, I promise some quality content.

Would you like to recommend this article to your friends or colleagues?
Feel free to share.