My Year of Code

2015 was my year to really dive into PHP. Up until this year, PHP was hobby language for me -- much as Python, Haskell, C++, Dart, JavaScript, and Java have been hobby languages. Granted, last year I finally took a job where PHP is where I spend half of my time.

This year, I took up intensive study of PHP. At the beginning of the year, I poured over the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, Third Edition by Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey. I even passed the Zend Certified PHP Engineer exam and earned my Zend Certification. I also took up more of a leadership role in my local PHP user group, KCPHPUG, gave a few talks, and have been hosting meetups both at work and at a local café. In the late Spring/early Summer, I began work on a PHP library called OPHP. In April, I attended the Lone Star PHP conference and got to meet and hang out with quite a few luminaries of the community.

I think I can safely say that 2015 has been a year of PHP for me.

For next year, my language of intensive study will be JavaScript. No matter who I talk with about programming, JavaScript seems to be the lingua franca of web programming. I have already started to look deeply into Sencha's Ext JS, which is the JavaScript framework we use at work. EcmaScript 6 has piqued my interest since it was ratified in June. I have also been interested in learning more about node since it has usage in Atom Electron and beyond.

By this time next year, I hope to have a native comfort in JavaScript.