Although, I’m surrounded by PHP masters, and PHP programming isn’t in my job description, I want to be at least “PHP dangerous”.
The first lessons if you want to reach your goals in a small company is that you have to be willing to do every job, and will probably have to do many of them. You have to be flexible, there is no organizational hierarchy to assign the work to.
So although not in my job description doesn’t include PHP programming, it will help me be a better participant in the company and in the products I care most about.
Discovering and isolating problems comes fairly naturally to me, as does duplicating other’s results, but turning a coding problem into a solution no longer does — I’m long out of practice, and that practice never included PHP.
Sure, I can fix a typo or add a token or two of code, but I’m long out of practice in creating real solutions. Getting there would give me a much better understanding of the WordPress code, and ultimately the experience.
I have my PHP book, PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Willing and Laura Thomson (purple spine, aquaducts on cover)
I used to be dangerous, but now I would just be destructive! I know what you mean….out of practice means out of touch in so many ways.
Trent
Ideal projects are something that can be done in a weekend. That way when you rewrite it from scratch six months later it isn’t as painful.
A decent development environment (PHP Eclipse, Zend Studio), and a solid Toolbox aka Framework (Symfony, Zend Framework) and you’ll be halfway there. Good luck, and never give up
I heavily recommend using a RCS (revision control system) – even for your small projects. Then hook it up to trac. Then you can go back and find your old stuff.
Check out http://devjavu.com – hosted SVN + Trac – startd by Jeff Lindsay (of SHDH fame) – if you don’t want to set up your own.
Or you can be a cool kid and use GIT or *cough* mercurial
Forget about PHP — you could be R-U-B-Y dangerous? Or, at least use a Rails-ish PHP framework like Cake.
If you’re hurting for small applications to write (which doesn’t sound like is the case, but anyways), try a programming kata. *Insert favorite search engine here* for several examples. Good luck.
Chris, that is awesome! I had totally forgotten about Code Kata!
Cool idea..Yes Code Kata can solve this