Comments on: 10 starting signs of a good web developer (php version)

By: Daquan Wright

Daquan Wright — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:39:00 +0000

That list looks great…

I would like to say that in terms of tools and such, to each their own. There are certain aspects to good developers but…a tool is just a package. And a package cannot make an artist, just as a package can not make a great developer.

You become good at something with effort, patience, and resilience. You aren’t born with knowledge, you earn it (this is in regards to someone posting about newbs having trouble writing scripts shouldn’t write them at all). You have to learn and push your way to where you want to be.

I agree with what was said pretty much..but just wanted to put that out there.

I’m learning php and I don’t have a programming background. Taught myself xhtml and then css. I’ll do the same with php, I just don’t expect to learn it all in one sitting.

Linux and DW are essentially tools but they are packages pretty much, and a tool can’t define inner creativity and logic. That’s how I see it. It’s usually in the “details” of aspects from which that comes from.

By: mem

mem — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:37:51 +0000

Sincerely? Still thinking a good PHP developer must use Linux? Why? Who cares about the OS? Nerds maybe. A good developer shouldn’t care at all about it.

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:23:09 +0000

and the version control?
I work in a team and SVN save our life when we are in diferents places of the city and we have to merge class and other code for our projects.
Not use Version Contol don’t mean that we are better programmer’s. I think that if we use version controler made our work better, and save time :)

Sorry about my english

By: kevin

kevin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:40:26 +0000

1. I hand coded HTML for years before I started using Dreamweaver CS3. Man I feel dumb. You can code so much faster with the right tools. (SOURCE MODE ONLY, DESIGN MODE IS BAD)

3. Linux is great…if you want to waste alot of time configuring it. Windows is much easier, has more resources, and higher variety in tools. But why not have the best of both worlds? I find using Windows to code, and Linux servers to host websites, the ideal environment.
Also, is there IE support on Linux? 30% or so of the web’s population still uses IE so any good web dev would not be able to ignore that.

4. Just because you use smarty doesn’t mean you won’t have “spaghetti code”. You can safely create nice templates using just inline php, if you do it correctly.

5. Personally, I think database abstraction layers are BS, but I have used PDO and it is quite nice. At the very least, you should be using something that supports parametrized queries.

10. RoR is over-hyped.

By: asvin

asvin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:17:23 +0000

Hi Nitish

I’am not really into frameworks, often they require a rather steep learning curve and personally I prefer writing my own code (framework) which I’ll understand quickly when debugging…

By: Nitish

Nitish — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:55:23 +0000

Good List above, just to add some

1. Use Frameworks, OOP (I use symfony)

2. MVC is a must

3. CSS 2.0 very important

4. Understand and Apply SEO concepts.

And others I will come with later.

By: SNR

SNR — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:38:25 +0000

Some thoughts:
1. Not very convincing to preach about the virtues of hand-cranking HTML in vi and how IDEs are automagic tools of doom and then say you use one? There’s a whole heap of difference between an Integrated Development Environment and a WYSIWYG code generator like those found in HotDog and Dreamweaver.

3. Its all very well saying that linux is a good development environment – and don’t get me wrong it is – but when you consider the number of web users that have M$IE/Win outweighs that of any other browser you might want to consider using a windows platform to make testing of your webapp easier.

Also just because you don’t know a better way than copying files to and from your machines doesn’t mean you can’t do on windows what you do on linux. Remote file editing is more than possible on windows just as it is on linux.

4. Spaghetti code is not the term you are looking for. Spaghetti code refers generally to overly complex code flows, classically found in Basic where excessive use of GOTO is found.

And the example you give is wrong – sorry. Its fine to put that type of PHP in your presentation layer, its WRONG to put and business logic there tho. The Smarty templating engine does little except replace a particular format of key-string in the tpl file for one you’ve already put in the key-value map. String replacement can be very expensive sometimes, its not a panacea to removing all tags in your presentation layer its an alternative.

I agree very much with the comments Alfred made, although I’d like to be pedantic there too and suggest that point 6 should be “Implement REST/SOAP APIs yourself”, i.e if you have a blog you’d have URLs like blog/delete?id=xxx, blog/update?… etc. This allows you to bolt on further functionality which can call back in to your application using a web services like interface.

Sorry if this came across as a bit harsh, didn’t mean it to be quite so. I do enjoy your blog but sometimes feel you don’t qualify or explain enough of some of the things you post.

By: alfred

alfred — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:52:06 +0000

Good list. Still I think couple of things are missing:

1. Version control. I don’t use it myself much ;) so I can be a better programmer.

2. Write good documentation for your code.

3. Write test-cases for your code.

4. Learn XML, JSON etc.

5. Learn to use APIs. See programmableweb.com/apis.

6. Write APIs (REST / SOAP) yourself.

7. Use a framework like Codeignitor / CakePHP / Zend.