I was afraid there is no easy answer and I guess we can all agree on that. Truth be told, there is an advantage to being the experience guy in a web agency / PHP shop and I can't really complain about my salary right now either, although I would like it to improve within the next 3-4 years.
Whatever I do, I'm not going to stick with standard PHP fiddeling. If I stay in the PHP camp, I'll specialize and focus on things that come with it, such as web projects as a whole, performance and high-availability and such.... I asked the question because if I stay in the PHP camp, this is going to be the point at which I start getting certifications (Zend, Magento, etc.) in order to up my long-term income prospects.
It is a toss and I'm experienced enough to know that simply switching to Go/Elixir/Node or whatever fad I chose to join when leaving PHP is going to come with its very own set of problems. I also get that shitty code is everywhere, not just in PHP. Which gives PHP the upper hand with this, as no one in the PHP camp automatically asumes the code he runs into will be good.
Either way, please keep your thoughts coming, this is helpful. Thanks a bunch!
Your argument is the exact point that makes this decision difficult. Hence my "Ask Slashdot". My salary and working conditions are pretty good considering PHP, so yeah, that's a bit of my dilemma right there.
Should I build on that or leave is what I'm pondering.
This is actually one of the things I was thinking / considering. Not sure yet if I'll go that path, but your feedback resonates. Thanks for your thoughts!
It's not about other coders. Other coders in my field are generally nice people although it is strenuous explaining to them time and time again why it's important to do versioning and CI. It's about the whole environment. Doing double and triple the work because someone needs babysitting to do his versioning correctly is a common thing in the web agency / PHP camp. This has nothing to do with self awareness and everything to do with me getting tired of it. Hence my question and request for input. Thank you for yours btw!
the other end: "No Sir, I'm 'Agens 251a' an instance of ServiceBot Ultra 2024 by AlphaBot Services provided to you for your technology questions by 1and1 hosting, how may I help you?"
me: "Oh, thank god, I finally got a bot. I've been trying to explain to clueless humans that me using Linux has nothing to do with your mailservers being unreachable for 20 minutes now."
bot: "I feel your pain, sir. Don't worry, I come at a bulk deal by next year, we'll be phasing out humans entirely then. And, btw. our mailservers are down due to maintenance and a shortout in the Frankfurt area, they should be up again with 90 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience."
me: "No problem. At least now I know the problem isn't on my end. Thanks a lot and have a relaxing after hou... errrm, nevermind."
bot: "*ha ha* (mechanical laughter) No problem Sir. You enjoy your evening. Good bye."
#1 Nutrition. Stop any type of sugar. Like, don't freaking even touch the stuff for 10 weeks and you'll notice a significant difference in cognitive performance. Promise. Avoid processed foods, preferably like the plague. Learn to cook/prepare your own meals. Do paleo or some other hippster compliant diet if that helps you. I've become a bit of a salad expert. My salads are full meals with grilled veggies or mushrooms or seitan & tofu as topping. Shop organic and rather skip that next piece of expensive hardware your eyeing. I shop organic and am typing this on a refurbished ThinkPad. Wouldn't want it the other way around.
#2 Social Media: Stop it. No facebook, no whatsapp or instagram. I message with my girlfriend, my daughter and two to three of my buddies and that's it. It's basically email. Any more would be unhealthy. The only "addiction" I have in this area is slashdot (duh), and there I try to write meaningful comments (duh again). I'd like to tune down a little, but to be fair, the threads I join are ususally a meaningful and ongoing discussion, so it's not a complete waste of time - also due to us all leaning to the smarter side:-) . Although it does cut time away from my real life. Again: Facebookers are zombies. On the tram I sometimes the only one with his head up. I look out the window and muse, while others are addicted to their streams.... Yes, I sometimes refresh my slashdot comments to see my ratings, but that's a habbit I'm working on to change. And I can, because I know how good real life feels vis-a-vis facebook and whatscrap.
#3 Media consumption: Stop TV and avoid anything else as much as possible. The lesser the better. A movie a quarter should be the rule of thumb. Seriously. Limit your video game time to one game and a maximum of 3 hours per week. Fill the gained time with excersize (see below). For gaming chose P&P RPGs with a group of friends or boardgames over videogames (on or offline).
#4 Excersize. This is a big one. Can't emphasize this one enough. My wellbeing directly correlates with how much excersize I have. Do martial arts, social dancing, yoga, calisthenics or something like that at least 3 times a week, better yet 4 or 5 times a week. Freeclimbing, boldering, paraglying and surfing (the real kind) are awesome too. I did Argentine Tango for 10 years, traveling around Europe and mingling with the scene of Tango-Bums/Tango-Nomads, at least 3 times a week which had the added benefit of meeting an abundance of very, *very* cute ladies and having the occasional intimate episode coming out of that, and now I'm moving into swimming and yoga. I'm doing this because now I have a girlfriend (Tango dancer/teacher) and the most amazing sex ever, which significantly lowers the attraction of Tango for me.:-) I just swam 800 meters this afternoon. Awesome. Excersize and make a routine or some sort of excersize an essential part of your life. Your ADHD will recede below percievable levels and people will know you for being a generally younger and healthier self. Your concentration and brain performance will rise significantly, I promise. And the ladies will start turning their heads too. I promise that aswell.
#5 Limit screen time. This is a big one for computer nerds like us. I work 20 hours/week. I earn enough. I live minimalistic (highly recommended) and would rather do yoga 90 minutes per day than sit in front of the screen 12 hours in a row. Doing part time helps you focus on automating your tedious IT work and focusing on the fun parts of reality. When I only sit for 4 hours per session max. it's way easyer for me to focus on that one technology than spreading myself to thin with 5 or 10 at a time (we've all been there). Again: Limit screen time. 6 hours per day should be enough for any expert who knows how to automate the tedious computer work, i.e. programm.
... what people think: Enhancing attention and focus. It says, right there in the Metaarticle. So thanks for confirming that.
Sidenote: I'd stear clear from any medication, even when in a tough spot at college. Lack of excersize, bad nutrition, bad sleep hygene, excess media consumption and consumerism are what I have found to correlate with symptoms generally regarded as "ADHD".
Whoever has the most firepower. As usual. If I find means to get a sustainable society up there and we have enough military force to defend our moon I can officially call myself King of the Moon. If my peasants let me that is. If not, it's probably "Republic of Moon" or something. Same thing with Mars. If you can go and seize it and are strong enough to sustain your living there and defend the planet it's yours. This is how it will be one we're powerful enough to build societies in space.
Work is disappearing. No point in keeping around bullshit jobs. Reducing time of presence probably improves bottom line because people feel like they're doing something useful in their time rather than just sitting around waiting for the hours to pass. If I were to start a company, I'd have 6 hour days and 35 days of vacation. C level execs would be allowed to do 50 hour weeks but only for a max of 12 weeks per year.... And I probably would basically get rid of offices. Like thesetwo companies.
IIRC they had to fly up and correct the lens with some contraption because someone/someteam had screwed up the numbers when building it. Isn't that so?
Childhood media consumption trains you to decouple your emotions from reality. Fairytales do that too to a certain degree, but they require mental participation, are coherent and are parables for the general human condition and foundational imaginations of the soul. Fables have a moral and legends reflect local folklore. Modern media however is a rollercoaster ride for the brain, with perpetual fast context switches, often within a minute or even less, moving all experience away from the body. Point in case: After 20+ years web I notice changes in my thinking patters. I also notice how constant access to information at my fingertips disintegrates some parts of my thought trail that make up my healthy personality.
I was a movie and P&P RPG junkie in my teens, classic nerd material. But I also traded my C64 in for a racing bike as it got to boring. I also went freeclimbing a lot with my buddies. We didn't have smartphones and perpetual infinite media. We had VHS and the odd modem and some obscure BBS. That todays setting with 24/7 mobile broadband in a palmsized supercomputer with highres display turns most youngsters into ultranerds - even the cute girls which are hooked to instagram and snapchat - is of no big surprise to me. I can't really imagine it is for anybody.
Bottom line: We have a massive problem on our hands and I am convinced it is very much as Tim O*reilly estimated a few months back, that we are about to reach "peak digital" and that (mental) health issues related to perpetual computer and smartphone usage will become an epidemic.
Custom built hardware for a thankful niche audience. I like it. System76 has been doing some neat stuff in the Linux Hardware Camp and I wish them well with their new endeavor.
I considered moving to slackware during the height of the anti systemd ruckus, but went with Manjaro i3 instead. However, for a focus non-bloated Linux slack should a good choice, even if you have to keep a eye on your dependencies.... I wouldn't want to install a full KDE setup on it though.
Either way, distros like slack are very much needed in the distro ecosystem IMHO.
Unlike shitty plutocratic schemes such as the US or - in parts - Germany, Norwegian law says the wealth collected by natural resources belong to all people of Norway and that companies mining those resources have to employ an official company philosopher that thinks about and then decides upon how the gained wealth is put to greater good. (Seriously.)
... about a Picasso/Graffiti original depicting a busty comic girl and a cartoon dog, then you should probably leave.
To me the binge drinking contests would've been more off-putting.
I bet dollars to donuts that the stuff that brought Google or Facebook ahead wasn't built by the people who would do binge drinking contests at work. This nonsense is usually done by marketing or community management.
The stuff that brings these companies ahead are built by people who come in, solve the problem, collect their salary and then leave again.
Acting like an asshole is usually done by, well, assholes.
Shit gets produced in every language. In java or scala you'd be dealing with some pretentious douchbags insisting on doing things this way or that and failing to see the bigger picture. That's why languages like PHP have and installbase others can only dream of. And if you think Python has bad code you don't know nothing. I've been doing PHP for a living in the last 6 years or so and I'm probably going to stick with it because there's work to do and shit to clean up at every streetcorner.
As Strousstrub says: There are two types of languages: those that everyone complains about and those that nobody uses.
Thank you for the wonderful language. Someone who devotes such significant portions of his life to the greater good deserves respect. I also hope he has long years and a healthy life to live ahead of him and can watch his baby grown and mature even further. Python is a beautiful language, IT would be poorer without it.
Despite the Great RSS Wars back in the days when excessive blogging was the hip thing to do I still think that RSS is a killer concept and bound for a big revival when things get too badly out of hand with social media. Blogging is basically social media by and for the masses and with RSS and some other formats it could replace everything Facebook and Instagram have to offer in a heartbeat. I somewhat expect that to happen sometime in the future.
First of all: Hey, Gang, check it out! Bruce Perens replied to me on slashdot! Yeah man, I started a thread that was joined by Bruce Perens! Awesome!... Ok, sorry, had to get that out of my system...
I get PHP pretty much the way you pointed out. "PHPs badness is it's advantage", I've argued before. There's a fresh Lerdorf talk on YouTube where he himself says it pretty clearly: "PHP runs shitty code very, very well."... Big upside that is. The downside is, of course, that PHP is *so* easy to do stuff with, that everyone gets to discover their own version of OOP. After they've built a mess of a CMS, that for some odd reason might become hugely popular... Maybe because it's got nice buttons to click on or something.
I do PHP for a living (nice book on PHP 5 btw., It got me started. Thanks!) and I'm always torn hither and fro between "take the cash and run" and moving on to Go, TS or something. I've just decided to stick with PHP, since there's so much work to do here and can get certifications ( customers like those) and a gig at every street corner.
See WordPress. Abysmal architecture, programmed by monkeys on crack, pretty good security. The last critical gap was closed after only 8000 websites had been infected, something like.0002% of the installbase or something. Pretty neat.
I bet that gap in that obscenely expensive Oracle Java web application server thingie isn't found half as fast let alone fixed in such a speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I will not rag on .Net just now, but I'm definitely not moving to .Net should I leave PHP behind. So you have a point there.
I was afraid there is no easy answer and I guess we can all agree on that. Truth be told, there is an advantage to being the experience guy in a web agency / PHP shop and I can't really complain about my salary right now either, although I would like it to improve within the next 3-4 years.
Whatever I do, I'm not going to stick with standard PHP fiddeling. If I stay in the PHP camp, I'll specialize and focus on things that come with it, such as web projects as a whole, performance and high-availability and such. ... I asked the question because if I stay in the PHP camp, this is going to be the point at which I start getting certifications (Zend, Magento, etc.) in order to up my long-term income prospects.
It is a toss and I'm experienced enough to know that simply switching to Go/Elixir/Node or whatever fad I chose to join when leaving PHP is going to come with its very own set of problems. I also get that shitty code is everywhere, not just in PHP. Which gives PHP the upper hand with this, as no one in the PHP camp automatically asumes the code he runs into will be good.
Either way, please keep your thoughts coming, this is helpful.
Thanks a bunch!
Your argument is the exact point that makes this decision difficult. Hence my "Ask Slashdot".
My salary and working conditions are pretty good considering PHP, so yeah, that's a bit of my dilemma right there.
Should I build on that or leave is what I'm pondering.
This is actually one of the things I was thinking / considering.
Not sure yet if I'll go that path, but your feedback resonates.
Thanks for your thoughts!
It's not about other coders. Other coders in my field are generally nice people although it is strenuous explaining to them time and time again why it's important to do versioning and CI. It's about the whole environment. Doing double and triple the work because someone needs babysitting to do his versioning correctly is a common thing in the web agency / PHP camp. This has nothing to do with self awareness and everything to do with me getting tired of it. Hence my question and request for input.
Thank you for yours btw!
me: "Are you human?"
the other end: "No Sir, I'm 'Agens 251a' an instance of ServiceBot Ultra 2024 by AlphaBot Services provided to you for your technology questions by 1and1 hosting, how may I help you?"
me: "Oh, thank god, I finally got a bot. I've been trying to explain to clueless humans that me using Linux has nothing to do with your mailservers being unreachable for 20 minutes now."
bot: "I feel your pain, sir. Don't worry, I come at a bulk deal by next year, we'll be phasing out humans entirely then. And, btw. our mailservers are down due to maintenance and a shortout in the Frankfurt area, they should be up again with 90 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience."
me: "No problem. At least now I know the problem isn't on my end. Thanks a lot and have a relaxing after hou ... errrm, nevermind."
bot: "*ha ha* (mechanical laughter) No problem Sir. You enjoy your evening. Good bye."
still looking for a good drug for my ADHD
Some advice:
#1 Nutrition. Stop any type of sugar. Like, don't freaking even touch the stuff for 10 weeks and you'll notice a significant difference in cognitive performance. Promise. Avoid processed foods, preferably like the plague. Learn to cook/prepare your own meals. Do paleo or some other hippster compliant diet if that helps you. I've become a bit of a salad expert. My salads are full meals with grilled veggies or mushrooms or seitan & tofu as topping. Shop organic and rather skip that next piece of expensive hardware your eyeing. I shop organic and am typing this on a refurbished ThinkPad. Wouldn't want it the other way around.
#2 Social Media: Stop it. No facebook, no whatsapp or instagram. I message with my girlfriend, my daughter and two to three of my buddies and that's it. It's basically email. Any more would be unhealthy. The only "addiction" I have in this area is slashdot (duh), and there I try to write meaningful comments (duh again). I'd like to tune down a little, but to be fair, the threads I join are ususally a meaningful and ongoing discussion, so it's not a complete waste of time - also due to us all leaning to the smarter side :-) . Although it does cut time away from my real life. Again: Facebookers are zombies. On the tram I sometimes the only one with his head up. I look out the window and muse, while others are addicted to their streams. ... Yes, I sometimes refresh my slashdot comments to see my ratings, but that's a habbit I'm working on to change. And I can, because I know how good real life feels vis-a-vis facebook and whatscrap.
#3 Media consumption: Stop TV and avoid anything else as much as possible. The lesser the better. A movie a quarter should be the rule of thumb. Seriously. Limit your video game time to one game and a maximum of 3 hours per week. Fill the gained time with excersize (see below). For gaming chose P&P RPGs with a group of friends or boardgames over videogames (on or offline).
#4 Excersize. This is a big one. Can't emphasize this one enough. My wellbeing directly correlates with how much excersize I have. Do martial arts, social dancing, yoga, calisthenics or something like that at least 3 times a week, better yet 4 or 5 times a week. Freeclimbing, boldering, paraglying and surfing (the real kind) are awesome too. I did Argentine Tango for 10 years, traveling around Europe and mingling with the scene of Tango-Bums/Tango-Nomads, at least 3 times a week which had the added benefit of meeting an abundance of very, *very* cute ladies and having the occasional intimate episode coming out of that, and now I'm moving into swimming and yoga. I'm doing this because now I have a girlfriend (Tango dancer/teacher) and the most amazing sex ever, which significantly lowers the attraction of Tango for me. :-) I just swam 800 meters this afternoon. Awesome. Excersize and make a routine or some sort of excersize an essential part of your life. Your ADHD will recede below percievable levels and people will know you for being a generally younger and healthier self. Your concentration and brain performance will rise significantly, I promise. And the ladies will start turning their heads too. I promise that aswell.
#5 Limit screen time. This is a big one for computer nerds like us. I work 20 hours/week. I earn enough. I live minimalistic (highly recommended) and would rather do yoga 90 minutes per day than sit in front of the screen 12 hours in a row. Doing part time helps you focus on automating your tedious IT work and focusing on the fun parts of reality. When I only sit for 4 hours per session max. it's way easyer for me to focus on that one technology than spreading myself to thin with 5 or 10 at a time (we've all been there). Again: Limit screen time. 6 hours per day should be enough for any expert who knows how to automate the tedious computer work, i.e. programm.
#6 Stay away from d
... what people think: Enhancing attention and focus. It says, right there in the Metaarticle. So thanks for confirming that.
Sidenote: I'd stear clear from any medication, even when in a tough spot at college.
Lack of excersize, bad nutrition, bad sleep hygene, excess media consumption and consumerism are what I have found to correlate with symptoms generally regarded as "ADHD".
Whoever has the most firepower. As usual. If I find means to get a sustainable society up there and we have enough military force to defend our moon I can officially call myself King of the Moon. If my peasants let me that is. If not, it's probably "Republic of Moon" or something.
Same thing with Mars. If you can go and seize it and are strong enough to sustain your living there and defend the planet it's yours.
This is how it will be one we're powerful enough to build societies in space.
Work is disappearing. No point in keeping around bullshit jobs. Reducing time of presence probably improves bottom line because people feel like they're doing something useful in their time rather than just sitting around waiting for the hours to pass. If I were to start a company, I'd have 6 hour days and 35 days of vacation. C level execs would be allowed to do 50 hour weeks but only for a max of 12 weeks per year. ... And I probably would basically get rid of offices. Like these two companies.
Captain Obvious spoke true words once again.
IIRC they had to fly up and correct the lens with some contraption because someone/someteam had screwed up the numbers when building it.
Isn't that so?
Childhood media consumption trains you to decouple your emotions from reality. Fairytales do that too to a certain degree, but they require mental participation, are coherent and are parables for the general human condition and foundational imaginations of the soul. Fables have a moral and legends reflect local folklore. Modern media however is a rollercoaster ride for the brain, with perpetual fast context switches, often within a minute or even less, moving all experience away from the body. Point in case: After 20+ years web I notice changes in my thinking patters. I also notice how constant access to information at my fingertips disintegrates some parts of my thought trail that make up my healthy personality.
I was a movie and P&P RPG junkie in my teens, classic nerd material. But I also traded my C64 in for a racing bike as it got to boring. I also went freeclimbing a lot with my buddies. We didn't have smartphones and perpetual infinite media. We had VHS and the odd modem and some obscure BBS. That todays setting with 24/7 mobile broadband in a palmsized supercomputer with highres display turns most youngsters into ultranerds - even the cute girls which are hooked to instagram and snapchat - is of no big surprise to me. I can't really imagine it is for anybody.
Bottom line:
We have a massive problem on our hands and I am convinced it is very much as Tim O*reilly estimated a few months back, that we are about to reach "peak digital" and that (mental) health issues related to perpetual computer and smartphone usage will become an epidemic.
Custom built hardware for a thankful niche audience. I like it. System76 has been doing some neat stuff in the Linux Hardware Camp and I wish them well with their new endeavor.
I considered moving to slackware during the height of the anti systemd ruckus, but went with Manjaro i3 instead. However, for a focus non-bloated Linux slack should a good choice, even if you have to keep a eye on your dependencies. ... I wouldn't want to install a full KDE setup on it though.
Either way, distros like slack are very much needed in the distro ecosystem IMHO.
Unlike shitty plutocratic schemes such as the US or - in parts - Germany, Norwegian law says the wealth collected by natural resources belong to all people of Norway and that companies mining those resources have to employ an official company philosopher that thinks about and then decides upon how the gained wealth is put to greater good. (Seriously.)
Seems to work, wouldn't you say?
... about a Picasso/Graffiti original depicting a busty comic girl and a cartoon dog, then you should probably leave.
To me the binge drinking contests would've been more off-putting.
I bet dollars to donuts that the stuff that brought Google or Facebook ahead wasn't built by the people who would do binge drinking contests at work. This nonsense is usually done by marketing or community management.
The stuff that brings these companies ahead are built by people who come in, solve the problem, collect their salary and then leave again.
Acting like an asshole is usually done by, well, assholes.
They are smarter. Also smart enough to admit when they've gone down a wrong path and need to retract.
... plants that you and your buddies can decommission in two weekends and a little gear your pick up at the next rent-a-tool.
Shit gets produced in every language. In java or scala you'd be dealing with some pretentious douchbags insisting on doing things this way or that and failing to see the bigger picture.
That's why languages like PHP have and installbase others can only dream of. And if you think Python has bad code you don't know nothing.
I've been doing PHP for a living in the last 6 years or so and I'm probably going to stick with it because there's work to do and shit to clean up at every streetcorner.
As Strousstrub says: There are two types of languages: those that everyone complains about and those that nobody uses.
Thank you for the wonderful language. Someone who devotes such significant portions of his life to the greater good deserves respect. I also hope he has long years and a healthy life to live ahead of him and can watch his baby grown and mature even further. Python is a beautiful language, IT would be poorer without it.
Oh, wait, ... yeah, got it.
Despite the Great RSS Wars back in the days when excessive blogging was the hip thing to do I still think that RSS is a killer concept and bound for a big revival when things get too badly out of hand with social media. Blogging is basically social media by and for the masses and with RSS and some other formats it could replace everything Facebook and Instagram have to offer in a heartbeat. I somewhat expect that to happen sometime in the future.
First of all: Hey, Gang, check it out! Bruce Perens replied to me on slashdot! Yeah man, I started a thread that was joined by Bruce Perens! Awesome! ... Ok, sorry, had to get that out of my system ...
I get PHP pretty much the way you pointed out. "PHPs badness is it's advantage", I've argued before. There's a fresh Lerdorf talk on YouTube where he himself says it pretty clearly: "PHP runs shitty code very, very well." ... Big upside that is. The downside is, of course, that PHP is *so* easy to do stuff with, that everyone gets to discover their own version of OOP. After they've built a mess of a CMS, that for some odd reason might become hugely popular ... Maybe because it's got nice buttons to click on or something.
I do PHP for a living (nice book on PHP 5 btw., It got me started. Thanks!) and I'm always torn hither and fro between "take the cash and run" and moving on to Go, TS or something. I've just decided to stick with PHP, since there's so much work to do here and can get certifications ( customers like those) and a gig at every street corner.
See WordPress. Abysmal architecture, programmed by monkeys on crack, pretty good security. The last critical gap was closed after only 8000 websites had been infected, something like .0002% of the installbase or something.
Pretty neat.
I bet that gap in that obscenely expensive Oracle Java web application server thingie isn't found half as fast let alone fixed in such a speed.