Digging myself out of a PHP coding hole
I may or may not have accidentally got myself stuck in a “coding hole” for the past few years. This is not only mildly concerning, but very annoying and I hope to fix it.
The problem
Now, the problem currently is that I have been heavily dependent on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. Though LAMP stack is a fast, easy-to-use setup, PHP is also not as popular as Node.JS, Python, and other back-end languages.
I have used PHP ever since I started learning to program and yes, it is a very important part of my development career, but I want to “pivot”. I need to start branching off and develop other projects with other languages.
Projects on my Github are mainly from web development and even most of my full-stack dev projects are PHP-based. This really limits the amount of programming diversity that I have in my portfolio and I should fix it.
What I plan to do
I want to start making projects with Java, Perl, and actually dive into some Javascript frameworks.
Node.JS has been gaining traction over the years and I think I will have to start learning. It’s an excellent back-end language according to others but this does mean I have to learn the entire thing from scratch. This could be possibly doable over in August and over the Fall term I should be ready to do projects in Node.JS.
A slight note
Since I still have 2 pet projects that heavily depend on a PHP back-end, I will most likely keep my stock/crypto tracker using PHP but I think my project management website could be converted to a Node.JS and Express backend on a Javascript stack.
This makes it a bit easier for me to know what my project priorities are, since I have a reason to focus more on getting the stock/crypto tracker done. These are decently sized projects so they do take a while.
Even at uOttaHack 3, I decided to use PHP instead since Java, JSP, and Apache Tomcat was too much of a hassle to deploy. It took me an hour and I still couldn’t get the Google Cloud server to run properly. As a result, we shifted back to PHP to save time.
What’s in store?
I’ll probably continue posting some updates here and there and possibly some small projects using a new tech stack. However, I will aim to do this more towards August since I’m done my summer term by the end of July.
- Kickstarting the Youtube Channel - 2021-01-12
- I really need to stop thinking of new pet projects - 2020-11-23
- Using Jupyter Notebook for my first data project - 2020-11-07
