DarqByte

My skills as a developer have come a long way in the two years I’ve been at my current job. Actually, I’ve been here since March 12th, 2007, so it’s just over 2 years.

When I got here, I thought I knew a lot about PHP. I was kinda wrong. I mean, I was a good programmer, at least I think I still am. But I just wasn’t very awesome at PHP. I’ve grown a lot since then and my style has changed greatly. Let me count the ways.

1. I’ve started doing object-oriented programming. Well, in this day and age, you need to be able to do this. I only worked with PHP 4 before getting here, since I was on shared hosting and all they offered was 4. They only offered 4 at my previous job, too. So now on PHP 5, I do actual object-oriented programming.
2. I’ve stopped using private variables all the time. This was early-on in my OOP that I used private variables a lot. Really, you don’t need private vars much.
3. My commenting is better. I actually comment things now.
4. My formatting is better. I’ve started using more industry-standard stylings, like uppercase TRUE/FALSE and other things you’ll find a lot in the open-source community. Camel-casing has also made a comeback in my programming.
5. I’m better at performance-driven applications. I wouldn’t always pay attention to things like running a function in a loop counter. Now I rarely ever make that mistake.
6. I’m getting better at things like unit tests. I still don’t like writing them, but I’m getting better at them.
7. I don’t use constants all over the place anymore. I used to use them a lot, but now I try to use things like config files and storing things in a registry, as opposed to a definition that can never be changed.
8. I’m learning more and more of Zend Framework. It’s a good software suite, too bad I didn’t learn more of it earlier.

Just a smattering of how I’m better. Nothing spectacular. Just happy to say I’ve progressed.