Becoming a Real Programmer

Becoming a real programmer.
Jacques Woodcock

@jacques_thekit

Friday, October 19, 12

Disclaimer


Before we begin, a little disclaimer. I’m a PHP developer, so this presentation has a lot of
reference to PHP speciﬁcs, though most the principles can be applied to other languages.

Some Background


I started doing web design in 2000,

Some Background 2000


back when Dreamweaver was a Macromedia product


?

Google was only the 12th top visited site beat out by

1st

12th


MSN

2nd

12th


Yahoo, Ebay, AOL

10th

12th


and GEO cities.

<html>
Some Background
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Because I was a designer, that meant learning basic HTML
coding principles by reading the source code written by



Dreamweaver, and we all know Dreamweaver writes

Some Background
Insert Photo
of Poo here


poo code.

HTML
JS
Some Background


This naturally lead me to wanting to understand more
advanced ways to add interaction to the HTML I was writing,
which lead to starting to study JavaScript.

HTML
JS
Some Background Flash


At the same time, I was doing Flash animations, also a
Macromedia product, and got highly interested in multimedia
design as an extension of wanting to add interactions to the
pages I was designing. At the time, Flash was the best way to
add interaction and took a equal focus to JavaScript, and
eventually most of the interaction focus.

HTML
JS


Once you start this rabbit hole, you'll eventually want to start
saving data and manipulating that data, so a couple years into
my career I ended up working in a Cold Fusion shop which
allowed me to learn my ﬁrst backend technology.

HTML
JS
ColdFusion


Finally, this rabbit hole lead me to learning the before
mentioned languages but also ColdFusion,

HTML
JS
ColdFusion
Lingo


Lingo

HTML
JS
ColdFusion
Lingo
ActionScript


ActionScript

HTML
JS
ColdFusion
Lingo
ActionScript
PHP


and PHP.

The Old Philosophy


But in doing all this, I had a basic philosophy of

The Old Philosophy
“I don't care how this works,
I just want it to work.”


"I don't care how this works, I just want it to work." It was a
very

The Old Philosophy
“Get R Done”


"Get 'R Done" style of programming.

The Old Philosophy
“I don't care how this works,
I just want it to work.”


I blame this mostly on the environment in which I learned these
languages, agency life, but that really is a copout. Sure, this
environment didn't really give me the luxury of spending time
to fully

To Grok =
1) Understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.
2) Empathize or communicate sympathetically; establish
a rapport.


grok things, but I could of done more myself. It also didn't help
that many of the languages that I learned, if not all, and the
time in which I learned them only exposed me to

Procedural Programming =
programming paradigm, derived from structured
programming, based upon the concept of the procedure
call.


a procedural method of programming.

The New Philosophy


But about a year ago, I realized I was limiting my ability to
accomplish the more ambitious tasks I was dreaming up, also
my peer group was shifting as I was hanging out with more
engineers as opposed to creatives. All this lead me to desire
more understanding of the skill set that made me most my
money. This only took 12 years.

The New Philosophy
Fully understand what I'm doing
and the technology I'm using to
make it happen.


So my new philosophy has been to "Fully understand what I'm
doing and the technology I'm using to make it happen."

The Path


This is the manner I've employed in which to make this new
philosophy happen.

Getting Involved The Path


First, I started getting involved in the community. To hang
around people who understand the technologies I used and
wanted to use. Also to ﬁnd people who were curious about
similar things I was curious about.

Nashville PHP


I found most these people at the NashvillePHP user group,
and the larger PHP community. At the time, I knew just about
nothing, I still know little. But I never felt like an outcast or
underneath anyone. It's been an amazing community to be a
part of.

PHP Mentoring


In the PHP community there is an initiative called PHP
Mentoring which pairs up mentors with apprentices. To me, this
is the best way to learn technology. I don't believe you need to
go to college for a degree to do 80% of what the programming
industry does. Even if you do, your real learning won't start
until you get into the marketplace.

Learning New Technologies


After getting involved next, you need to know what
technologies you actually need to learn.



You won't ﬁnd these in isolation, thus the importance of getting
involved. Even then, a lot of what you learn is personal choice,
not because of some standard. So being exposed to as many
ways a possible to solve a program and the technologies used
is the best way to make an informed decision on what you
should learn.

5 Tools Every
PHP
Developer
Should Know

Mr. PHP

Still, there are good guidelines that you can refer to such as
Cal Evan's "5 Tools Ever PHP Developer Should Master". In
this article Cal explains that the 5 tools ever PHP developer
should master are:

1 Framework


A framework: PHP is full of frameworks. So many that you’d probably never learn them all.

2 Version Control
Git
SVN
Jira
Many others...


Version Control: PHP works with all the major version control options that other languages
also can use.

3
Entity Relationship Diagram
(ERD)


Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD): Databases can get ridiculously massive, easily.

4 Debugger


A Debugger: Going through code 1 line at a time sucks. Use a debugger.

5 Unit Tester


Finally a Unit Tester: Write tests to insure your code works in all use cases or go you’ll be
going through your code line by line again.

1. Framework
2. Version Control
3. ERD
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Mr. PHP

So that was
1. A Framework
2. A version Control System
3. An ERD tool (Entity relationship Diagram)
4. A Debugger
5. A Unit Testing Tool

1. Framework
2. Version Control
3. ERD
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Mr. PHP

All of these things are very important to learn, though I don't
fully agree that learning a Framework and an ERD are on my
top 5 tools, but still it's a good starting point. The ERD is an
arguable point, but the Framework I'm pretty ﬁrm about for this
reason:

1. Framework
2. Version Control
3. ERD
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Mr. PHP

Frameworks are great for saving you time and effort, but
unless you already understand the language you'll always be
limited to what you can accomplish.

1. Framework
2. Version Control
3. ERD
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Mr. PHP

Not only that, you'll never be able to maintain that framework
or ﬁx issues with it when they arise, and they do arise. I liken it
to buying a car: If you don't know how that car works you'll
always be reliant on someone else to ﬁx and maintain it, thus
making you only a user and not an engineer.

1. Framework
2. Version Control
3. ERD
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Mr. PHP

Paul M Jones said a really smart thing once, and if you know
Paul you know he always does, "Everyone should write a
framework once, then throw it away." The idea being that by
writing your own framework, you understand truly what goes
into your application's codebase, what problems can arise and
how to ﬁx them.

1. Basic Sys Admin
2. Command Line
3. Version Control
4. Debugger
5. Unit Tester

Not Mr. PHP

So what would my list look like?
1. Basic Sys Admin Skillz
2. Command Line
3. Version Control
4. Debugging
5. Unit Testing



So what have I focused on learning over the past year? Well,
since I already knew PHP I focused on other gaps I had in my
toolbox.



First was to get my basic system admin skills up to par. I won't
say this should be your ﬁrst thing to learn, but it is a skill that all
good developers should have and will need at some point.



It's like learning your OS environment and just as important. To
just learn an application that runs on the OS as opposed to the
OS and it's applications is like just learning how to use IE on
Windows. A lot of shit is going to go bad and you're not going
to have any idea of why.


LAMP Stack


The ultimate goal of learning basic sys admin tasks is to be
able to setup and maintain your own development stack. In
PHP that's


Linux

Linux,


Apache

Apache,


MySQL

MySQL or equivalent,


PHP

and PHP.

Environment Learning New Technologies


Next you need to consider your development environment.
While learning the sys admin stuff, it's a good time to evaluate
your whole development environment.

Command Line


I believe most people should expose themselves to the
command line at some point in their career, preferably early.
This is the gateway to fully understanding how your computer
works and harnessing and manipulating it's power. I believe
this so much that I push for new developers to learn from the
command line, not the OS's GUI.

Command Line


Next in the environment is the Command Line
Also my push for command line usage comes from my desire
for efﬁciency. GUIs use a ton of RAM, and I'd rather save that
RAM for executing tasks, not writing them.

Virtual Machine


Next up is a Virtual Machine
I personally like to keep my computer as clean and
independent as possible from my dev environments so I like to
setup a virtual machine and install my stack and application
into it. Ben Ramsey has a good post on this. I also did my own
post. You can ﬁnd in the resources of this deck.

Virtual Machine


You can use VirtualBox, which is free, or Parallels or VMWare
or any VM software to accomplish this. Conﬁguration will be
unique to each solution though, so make sure to do a bit of
research to see which you like best.

Integrated Development
Environment (IDE)


Now that we have an environment, we need to choose an IDE
Back in 2000, I started with Dreamweaver. Because I came
from the visual world, Dreamweaver was the best solution for
me at the time, though because most GUI IDEs suck horribly
at writing clean code, I ended up having to learn how to write
most my HTML by hand.

Integrated Development
Environment (IDE)


From there, I moved to Coda and really enjoyed it, but I found
as I was moving to understanding the command line even
further while learning the LAMP stack management, that Coda
separated me to far from the command line. So I moved to
VIM, which is an amazingly powerful and lightweight IDE which
you can spend years learning and becoming more efﬁcient
with.

Source Control


Finally, I needed something better for source control,
something remote. So I picked up Git, though I'm still a newb.
Again, I use Git from the command line, though there are
GUIs, mainly because my terminal interface is now my OS
environment and also to save RAM.


PHP Application

PHP MySQL

Apache GIT VIM

CentOS

VM VirtualBox

Terminal App
OSX


So my environment is made up of the follow:
- OSX is my main OS
- Terminal App as my primary tool
- VirtualBox Running CentOs for my Development Server
! I’ve also run Ubuntu 11 on Parallels
- VIM for my IDE
- Git and GitHub for source control

Philosophy Learning New Technologies


Once you have a solid development environment, you can
start focusing on the real important stuff, cause now that your
tools are solid you can do solid work. So let’s talk about your
development philosophy a now.

Object Orientated
Programming


First thing ﬁrst. If you are a procedural developer as I was, like
a number of PHP developers are, you need to start studying
object oriented programming. There are so many reasons to
do this, but none more important than it is the right way to write
your application. From efﬁciency to organization to reduction in
duplication, there are so many reasons.

Object Orientated
Programming


Now, this is not an easy thing to do by yourself and in fact, it's
almost impossible to get all the nuances of OOP without
having someone with experience walk you through it. This is
why PHP mentoring has been really important to me. The one-
on-one time with someone who knows all about this topic, as
well as others, insures I fully understand what I'm trying to
grok.

Design Patterns


Along with understanding OOP comes learning about design
patterns. Model View Controller is one pattern you've probably
heard of, but there are many many more. To understand how
to properly solve a programming problem it helps to have a
good understanding of the different patterns and what types of
problems they are good at solving.

Design Patterns


I recommend the Design Patterns Elements for Reusable
Object-Oriented Software by the gang of 4. It's a pretty
complex book with a lot of complex topics. I recommend
reading it with someone else or at least ﬁnding someone you
can talk about the topics with.

Test Driven
Development


Now I don't fully buy into test driven development, I do
however believe in testing even if I don't always execute this
perfectly, but it is a very useful tool to insure your code is
lightweight and works.

Test Driven
Development


Test Driven development is about writing your tests ﬁrst, then
writing the classes and methods. All tests will fail ﬁrst and then
you refactor by making the test work, then breaking them, then
getting to work again until you have the simplest solution to
your problem.

Support Learning New Technologies


So as you code, you'll ﬁnd the need for support tools to help
execute all these practices. Depending on what language you
develop in, your tools will be different, but for PHP here a
couple I use.

Standards Sniffer


A standard sniffer insures you are writing code that complies
with a coding standard, such as in PHP there are Pear,
PSR2.0 and many others. The standard sniffer will review your
code for formatting compliance.

Standards Sniffer


The reason you do this is so when you work with other people
or with a team, all code that is written looks the same, allowing
anyone on the team to easily pick up where someone else left
off and ﬁnish the work.

Testing; Unit and
Functional


Each language has built in testing tools. Use these, make sure
your code works in all use cases. Break it and then ﬁx it and
then break it again and then ﬁx it again. There is nothing more
important than the knowledge that the code you've written
works, even when changes are made.

Future Technologies


So this is a start. There is so much more that I want to learn
and need to learn. I just wanted to spend a sec highlighting
these.

Future Technologies
Continuous
Integration


Continuous integration is a process for combining your
development, build, quality control and testing, and launching
of your application. It’s about automation of repetitive tasks in
development.

Future Technologies
Python


At some point I want to play with Python because of it’s
differences to PHP, and also because some concepts I have
would be better solved with a less web focused language.

Future Technologies
Selenium


Selenium

Future Technologies
Nonrational
Database


At some point I want to experiment with a nonrational database
as I’m quite familiar with standard SQL-rational database.

Future Technologies
Nonrational
Database


iOS, I have a few concepts that would be best suited on such
an interactive medium, plus because I come from the UX/UI
world, I’ve always been fascinated with the iOS platform for
that reason.

So many more...


The list actually goes on from there, as you can tell, I’m
curious.

Continue Learning


Finally, it's important to keep learning. Stay hungry for
knowledge. This will not only give you some sense of fulﬁllment
but will also insure you stay employable as a programmer.

Always be learning.


Our industry changes almost daily. To stay competitive you
much keep up with these changes.

So always be learning.

Resources
www.nashvillephp.org
www.phpmentoring.org
http://blog.calevans.com/2009/02/09/5-tools-every-php-developer-should-master/
http://benramsey.com/blog/2012/03/build-php-54-on-centos-62/
http://jacqueswoodcock.tumblr.com/post/21849873018/installing-apache-and-php-5-4-
on-a-clean-ubuntu-install
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/
0201633612/


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