#newdeveloper

I am a mobile designer learning to be an iOS developer.  Here is my journey toward my nano degree in iOS mobile development.

My first project is called Pitch Perfect.

By - Danny Nunez

I see countless posts and questions by new developers who want to break into the PHP development world. A common question is  What is the best way to gain PHP experience? Common answers are to build up a github profile, start blogging, internships or pro-bono work. Yeah that sounds great but for someone who is truly green that may be a little outside of their comfort zone If it is for someone looking to learn relevant skills to break into the job market the advice is a little vague. Most of the advice given online is from the hobbyist’s perspective and not from the perspective of someone who has a mortgage to pay and a family to take care of.  Below is a list of options a new php developer should take to gain experience that will hopefully land you that first PHP Web Development job.

CMS or FrameWork

I recommend picking either a CMS or a Framework. Please choose one of the popular options listed below. And stay away from small lesser known frameworks unless you want to code for fun then please do. The goal of this advice is to get the new developer into the job market faster. A quick search on indeed.com for a framework or CMS in your area will give you an idea of what Job Skills are in demand.

ZEND - http://framework.zend.com/

Tutorials – Good Luck.

Pros: 

High Salary – Low Supply of PHP Developers with Zend Experience

Job Security – very few PHP developers take on the challenge of learning Zend

Cons: 

Extremely High Learning Curve

Used mainly by enterprise business – ( This could be a plus if you are looking for stability. Just be prepared for the corporate lifestyle. )

Symfony  -  http://symfony.com/ 

Tutorials - 

Tuts Plus 

KNP University 

Screenfony 

The Symfony Book 

Pros: 

High Salary

Lots of Documentation

Very Large Community

Cons: 

High Learning Curve

Laravel -  http://laravel.com/

Tutorials - 

Tuts Plus 

Laracasts

medium.com

Pros: 

Low Learning Curve

Lots of Documentation

Large and Growing Community

Cons: 

A relative newcomer to the php framework there are fewer employers looking for developers with Laravel experience.

Other Frameworks:

YII

Silex

Slim

CakePHP

auraphp

Phalcon

WordPress - http://wordpress.org/

Tutorials - 

Tuts Plus 

wp101

Lynda.com

Pros: 

Low Learning Curve

Lots of Documentation

Large Community

Low barrier to entry for Jobs

Cons: 

Oversaturated Job Market

Low paying entry level jobs

WordPress Developers are expected to be a Jack of All Trades – Frontend and Backend

Hated by PHP Elitists

Drupal - https://www.drupal.org/

Tutorials - 

Tuts Plus 

Durpalize ME

Lynda.com

Pros: 

Low Learning Curve

Lots of Documentation

Large and Growing Community

Cons: 

Oversaturated Job Market

Low paying entry level jobs ( But they do increase nicely with experience)

Drupal Developers are expected to be a Jack of All Trades – Frontend and Backend

Hated by PHP Elitists

Drupal 8 is changing a lot of the under the hood code – So beware you will have to learn two version of the CMS to enter the Job Market as you will have to maintain Drupal 7 and build out new Drupal sites with Drupal 8.

Joomla - http://www.joomla.org/

Tutorials - 

Tuts Plus 

SiteGround

Lynda.com

Pros: 

Low Learning Curve

Lots of Documentation

Large and Growing Community

Cons: 

Oversaturated Job Market

Low paying entry level jobs

Joomla Developers are expected to be a Jack of All Trades – Frontend and Backend

Hated by PHP Elitists

Certifications

PHP Certification: http://www.zend.com

MYSQL Certification: http://education.oracle.com 

COMP TIA Linux Certification: http://certification.comptia.org 

Unicorn Skills That will be required – (Some how through magic)

Linux - https://linuxacademy.com/linux

Apache - lamp-stack

Nginx – Scaling PHP

Git Version control - https://try.github.io , https://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-git

HTML5 - http://html5doctor.com/

CSS  2 and 3 - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

JavaScript - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

Jquery

Jquery UI 

At least  one JavaScript Framework

Angular JS

Backbone JS

Ember JS

htaccess - http://htaccessbook.com/

Photoshop  - Yes PM’s will expect you to also be a designer for some reason.

UI/UX - Yes PM’s will expect you to also be a designer for some reason.

Unit Testing - http://phpunit.de/ or Chris Hartjes will destroy you. 

PHP Composer  - Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. 

PHP Code Standards - http://www.php-fig.org/

REST  - Restful Web Apis 

PHP Security – Building Secure PHP Apps

Sample Projects

You will need to complete a few sample projects to get a few of the basic skills required for an entry level developer.

Build a CMS – If you choose to take the framework route you will more than likely be asked to build a small custom cms.

Pages

Posts

File management

User management

Sitemap Generator

Menu Management

Build a Web Scraper – When transferring old sites to a cms. You will need to have the skills below to make the process easier.

Scrape Links from a website

Scrape Content from a website

API – API integration is all the rage. A must have for any web developer.

Google Analytics

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Salesforce

Build a Custom Plugin for the CMS of your choice.

Build a Custom Theme for the CMS of your choice. ( Use themeforest for inspiration )

Stock Bootstrap Theme

Stock Foundation Theme

CSS Dropdown menus and Flyout Menus – PM’s love these

Crazy CSS Animations - PM’s love these

JQuery Animations - PM’s love these

Sliders - PM’s love these

Conclusion

By John Sonmez

My software development career began about 15 years ago.

But only in about the last 5 years did I really start to see a large boost in my software development career.

Here are some of the things I wish I would have known when I got started in the software development industry; things that would have made me more successful, much earlier, if I would have known them.

There is no “right way” in software development

I wasted a large amount of time, both in studying and arguing, early on in my career, falsely believing there was an absolute “right way” for many aspects of software development.

It turns out that just about everything I once thought was correct about software development at some point turned out to be wrong.

But more importantly, I found that very few things were black and white.  Almost every decision when writing code and developing software is based on the current circumstances.

I’ve talked before about how the religious adoption of a technology can be harmful to software developers, but this topic goes beyond just a technology.

It is also true that no best practice is universal.  Even highly charged topics like whether or not to unit test or whether agile or waterfall methodologies are best, do not have straightforward one-is-always-right answers.

In my career, I’ve wasted plenty of time on the “right way” road that led to nowhere instead of taking the “pragmatic” (practical) road, which would have carried me much further.

Reading a book cover-to-cover is not the best way to learn

When I first started wanting to grow my knowledge of programming and different technologies, I spent too much time reading technical books about a specific technology cover to cover.

There is nothing wrong with reading books, but often the choice of what book to read and what parts of it to read are very important.

For example, I remember reading a very large book on programming with Visual C++.  (I’m pretty sure it was an earlier version of this book.)  Anyway, the book was a good book with lots of information, but reading it cover to cover was not the best approach to learning Visual C++.

I would have learned and retained a lot more by skimming over the chapters of the book to get a broad understanding of what there was to know about Visual C++, then figuring out what things were most important to learn first.

I would have had much more success by sitting down and actually practicing the basics by trying to actually build something than just reading or going through examples in the book.  You don’t really learn a technology until you’ve solved real problems with it.

Learning particular technologies in-depth is a waste of time

Not only did I waste time by reading books cover to cover, but I also often chose to read the wrong books.

I had mistakenly believed that learning a particular technology inside-out would be a good way to advance my career.

I spent too much time reading books about very specific technologies like ASP.NET or Hibernate instead of reading more books like “Code Complete,” “Clean Code,”and “Agile Principles, Patterns And Practices in C#.” (All of these books, by the way, I recommend that you read, if you haven’t already.)

While it is important to know about the technology you are using, it isn’t important to be an absolute expert in that particular technology.  There isn’t much benefit to knowing the exact API call to make when you can just easily look it up when you need it.

Too many technologies that I spent a good amount of time learning about in depth, ended up either dying out or being technologies that I eventually abandoned myself.  Most of the knowledge about those specific technologies ended up representing a big waste of time.

I found that it was important to become an expert at whatever programming language that I was using at the time, because expertise in a particular programming language will usually last you a pretty long time; I definitely would have still spent time learning in depth about C++, C# and Java, but, I perhaps, spent a little too much time learning all the intricacies of C++, which isn’t benefiting me much now.

Community is extremely important in your software development career

Early in my career, I made the mistake of not really reaching out to the community for help and to provide help to others.

I was always good about helping my coworkers and being social at the various jobs I held, but I never really reached much beyond my company.

I spent a large amount of time trying to make an investment in my career at a particular company at the expense of making an investment of my time in the software development communities that I was involved in.

I spent lots of time creating internal presentations on technologies or best practices that could have been spent creating content and material that could have served the community as a whole, as well as brought me recognition at my job.

I also made the mistake of not thinking that I had something valuable to contribute.

I talk to many beginning software developers now and sometimes I think they have much more to contribute to the community than us software developers that have been in the field for a long time, because they understand better the issues that other beginners are struggling with.

If I could do it over again, I would have made sure to be much more involved in conferences and user groups earlier in my career.  I would have started my blog much earlier and I would have used much of my learning time to create projects and resources that would be able to help others rather than just reading a book.

Always have a side project

Perhaps the biggest change I would have made that would have impacted my career the most would have been to cut out all the TV watching, Everquest and World of Warcraft playing I did earlier in my life and replace that time with work on a side project.

I’ve wasted a pretty sizable amount of time in my life doing things that were enjoyable, but didn’t produce any long term benefit for my life.

About 3-4 years ago, I pretty much cut out watching TV completely and now I hardly ever watch movies either.  TV and most movies are just a huge waste of time that you could be using to do something useful.  The same goes for video games for the most part, but at least with video games you are actively doing something not just absorbing useless information.

I’ll always love to play video games and I don’t think I’ll ever stop, but I do wish I would have spent a good deal of the time I spent playing video games and watching TV on a side project instead.

Sadly, the first real side project I actually took on was only about 3 years ago when I started creating my first Android application.

When you are working for someone else, it is really important to spend time working for yourself as well, otherwise you are building someone else’s empire while neglecting your own.

10 Secrets You Should Have Learned with Your Software Engineering Degree – But Probably Didn’t

By Andy Lester Posted in Nerd Culture, Tech Topics 3 June 2014

It’s an all too common story: You go to school for years and years and walk out with a freshly printed diploma, snag your first job, and yet get immediately blindsided by unwritten rules and other day-to-day complexities that no one bothered to warn you about. And programming is no exception.

Few students are 100% prepared for their first real job. And a computer science degree is lot more than a vocational degree solely designed to prepare students for a job writing banking apps. But I’m still continually surprised to see how many recent graduates—and even some experienced programmers—who still edit their code in Notepad or Pico and don’t know how to use version control.

If you don’t want to be “that person” – or don’t want to be that person anymore — take the time to learn these 10 basic skills and you won’t need hand-holding to get the real work done:

1. Version control systems

It’s perhaps the biggest omission in computer science curricula. Institutions of higher education teach how to create source code for programs, but usually ignore everything about the management of that code. Every programmer should know how to create repositories, edit and commit code, and branch and merge effectively as part of a project workflow using Git or Subversion. Knowing about version control systems also means that you’ll know better than to work for any organization that doesn’t use one.

2. How to write

Working as a programmer is more than just writing in a programming language. You also have to write release notes for your projects. You write commit messages for version control. You write tickets for bugs in the system. All of these and many more require clear, effective English communication – a skill that computer science programs seldom emphasize.

3. Regular expressions

Regexes are a language all their own, and every modern programmer needs to be adept in their use. Every programming language supports regexes or has standard libraries to work with them. If part of your code assignment is to validate that a part number is five letters, a dash and a digit, you should be immediately able to express that as /^[A-Z]{5}-\d$/.

4. Using libraries

It’s 2014, and nobody needs to use a regular expression to extract the hostname from a URL. Every modern programming language includes a standard library of common functionality, or has standard libraries easily available.

Programmers need to understand that code that has already been written, tested, and debugged is going to be better quality than new code that she has to create. Even more important, code that doesn’t have to be written can be implemented much faster.

5. SQL

As someone said to me at a meetup recently, “All the SQL I know I learned on the job. Why are databases an elective? What doesn’t use a database?”

The era of storing data in flat files is over. Everything goes into and out of a database, and SQL is the language that’s used to retrieve it. SQL is also a declarative language, not a procedural language, and so requires learning a new way of thinking about problem solving. But every programmer should understand the basics of database normalization and be able to do SELECTs (including basic INNER and OUTER JOINs), INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs.

6. Tool usage: IDEs, editors, CLI tools

A carpenter would never complete an apprenticeship knowing how to use a only hacksaw, so it’s astonishing that schools can turn out CS graduates who know only Notepad or pico. It’s the job of programming tools to help manipulate the source code and all other data in the computer to make the programmer’s life easier. The Unix command line, shell scripting, find, grep, and sed should be part of every programmer’s knowledge set.

7. Debugging

Every programmer should be able to debug with an interactive debugger or by sprinkling print statements liberally throughout the code. The ability to track down a problem through stepwise refinement is too important to be left for programmers to learn by the seat of their pants.

8. Defensive programming

Even rockstar programmers are fallible, much of the world is out of our control, and things will go wrong. Defensive programming is about understanding that simple truth. If things didn’t go wrong, we wouldn’t have to check file opens for success, or assert that customer IDs are valid integers, or to test our code to make sure that it works properly.

Programmers need to grasp that compiler warnings are helpful tools that make life easier, not nuisances to be avoided. Every programmer should know why each PHP program should start with error_reporting(E_ALL), or each Perl program with use strict; use warnings;.

9. Teamwork

Very few programming jobs allow you to work entirely on your own–and those that do are often intellectually crippling and leave you a worse programmer than when you started. Your code must interact with code written by others, or often be intermingled with code from others. No matter how talented, a programmer who can’t collaborate on projects with others has negative productivity, an quickly becomes a liability to the organization.

10. Working on existing code

In school, every class assignment is a new, greenfield project. That’s not how it works in the real world. The first thing that happens to new hires is they get assigned to fix ticket #8347 in the bug tracking system. After that, they have to add a small new complementary feature to an existing system with an established codebase. Designing new code comes months later, if they’re lucky.