What I learned in the last 2 years

I quit my job and this can be considered as a short recap of my last 2 years with some advice for new people getting into the dev world.

TL;DR: Books are great, if you want to be better, you will have to read. Join the community and start giving back. If you are not happy with your current job, it is time for a change. Don’t allow yourself to get too comfortable, that is never a good sign.

So, I am a PHP Developer, 2 years ago I knew basic procedural PHP and Wordpress. I was looking for an internship, so I could get my Bachelor’s degree and that is where my career began. School didn’t teach me much, they introduced me to PHP and Web Development but that is about it, most of the things I know now, I learned on my own.

Over a year ago I was at work, and I was in between projects, so I didn’t have much work to do. I was never a fan of books, and I was always looking for a video tutorial to learn new things. I saw a book named Refactoring at the shelf and I started reading. I can’t explain what that book did to my code, but I started writing code that was a lot better, cleaner and more understandable. I was hooked, and since then I am always looking for my next book and I started improving a lot faster, everything was getting easier to understand. Books are great, they teach so much more than people think, you can’t even compare the stuff you learn from books to video tutorials. I barely even watch tutorials now. Don’t wait, grab a book as soon as you can. I dedicate around 1 hour per day to reading, and it is enough, you can’t force anything.

Besides reading books, I started attending user groups and conferences. Almost all conferences are recorded, and they upload videos online, so if you can’t attend find them online and watch. Conferences are great, you can learn a lot and my recommendation is to start watching them. My old company started doing meetups, and I was the first one that was giving a talk. It was few months ago and about Symfony 4. I was nervous, and I was not really happy about how I handled it but it was a great experience and you can’t get better if you don’t do it. Maybe you are not for public speaking but you will never know if you don’t try.

Over half a year ago, the thing that made me improve a lot was joining the community, in my case it was the Symfony Slack chat and I also joined Twitter and started actively using Github where I started following people from PHP world. Everything that is important I first see on Twitter. I never thought that a Social Network could have an impact on my career, but I was wrong. On Github, the first thing you see is the activity tab, I regularly check what people star and that is another way how I find great tools that I use. Joining Symfony Slack was one of the greatest decisions I made. There are a lot of great and smart people there and I had a lot of great discussions that helped me understand things better. There is a #support channel, and there is always someone online that is ready to help. If you are still not on Slack/Gitter/IRC or whatever your community is using, find it and join, you can’t lose anything, but you can have a great experience and learn something. I am sad that I learned about Slack Chat so late, but better late than never.

Another thing that helped me was to start giving back to the community. How many times did you find a solution to a problem that you couldn’t solve on some random blog? If you don’t have a blog, it is time to create one, every developer should have one. You can start writing about the issues you encountered and the solution you came up with, because you never know who will find your blog post and be grateful that you wrote it. Another way to give back to the community is contributing to FOSS. We all depend on open source software and use it every day, one of the things that made me start contributing to FOSS was this great tweet:

With the help of @greg0ire that I met at Slack I made my first PR ever on Sonata Project. It was a great experience and I continued contributing. I enjoy helping people and programming so FOSS is a thing that makes me happy, I also improved my skills and understanding of how the tools I use work. If you have spare time, find a FOSS library you use every day, help them with some issues, maintainers love to see that “First-time Contributor” badge and are always eager to help new people.

So, what went wrong? Why did I quit my job?

I was getting too comfortable, I was doing stuff I already knew and did a lot of times. I started feeling like I was wasting my time. I was learning and reading about great stuff (currently DDD) that I didn’t have the opportunity to use and my every day at work was just like washing the dishes, I had to do it but I didn’t like it. I had to do something, I started looking at job offers and that was it. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that I was given an opportunity to work at my old job and I met some great people but I wasn’t happy. If you can do something about it, go for it, you should be happy, don’t allow yourself not to be.

I guess that is it, if this post helps you in any way that is enough of a reward for me.