I really like coding in the PHP language.

I’ve done quite a bit of programming in my life. I started in primary school when I found a book on the BASIC programming language. It was a book with a lot of snippets of code in. I copied the stuff, ran it, saw how it worked, changed it a bit, ran it again, and so on. Little did I know, but that would be the start of a journey that is still carrying on 20 years later.

From then I got hold of any book I could on any programming language and just started playing around. A language that I really got into in high school was Pascal. It was due to the fact that I had to use this for the Computer Science course I was taking, but it didn’t bother me. There was so much that it had to offer. By this time we had gotten Internet at home as well, and I was just downloading Pascal guides and code snippets. I made various stupid little things, but it all helped build a valuable understanding of development structures and best coding practises.

When I got to University, they were using C++ as the language of preference. By this time though I had long ago found C and C++ to be very powerful languages. I’d be using Linux for 4 years at this point so C was well known to me. In those days you still have to alter code for it to work on your Linux system, so I was forced to learn about it.

Around the 3rd year of University as the first time they had started with object orientated programming. They chose Java as the language of choice. OOP was old news to me by this point, so some of the lectures were really really boring, and for most of the time I couldn’t understand why we were doing what we were doing. Looking back now, I am glad I had that experience. I don’t think they were really honing the development skills of the people, but rather trying to hone your problem solving skills. To this day, I think that gives me an advantage when it comes to software development, and even understanding how other software packages work.

Anyway, so during this time I got a guide on PHP development, because I was really interested in web application. And because there is so much PHP information out on the Internet, it was a very easy learning curve, and I’ve been using that since then. At the same time I was learning to use Delphi. Delphi was awesome for Windows application developments.

It’s been about 8 years now that I’ve been using PHP, and every day I still learning something new. I take on projects that I find interesting and that will challenge my capabilities, and in my spare time I write little projects just to see if I can. If I see something on the web, or read about something, I always try to see if I can replicate it, or at least develop the algorithm in my head, just to know I can :)

I almost exclusively use PHP these days, because I do a lot of web application development. The scope of what you can do with PHP is limitless. The fact that you’ve got so many content management systems out there that also use PHP, makes it even more powerful. You can take an already powerful system like Drupal, and add on modules that you’ve written to make it even more powerful.

I started this PHP Development Blog, not because I think I will be able to give you ground breaking techniques of using PHP, but rather to share my ideas, and get input about it from other people. So let me know what you think.