The PHP Engineer

Being an engineer is hard work; to put it plainly, there isn’t much difference between it and being a migrant worker. For PHP programmers just starting out, problems are plentiful too, so here I’ll give a brief summary. When you’re doing development without experience, you often get stuck — that’s unavoidable. You’ll want to ask for help in a group, but you’ll find that most people who know the answer basically ignore you, or if they do respond, they just give you a hint at the approach. First of all, when you hit a problem, search Baidu or Google yourself, or just translate the error message. Second, you can post the error content to the group and explain your thinking in detail — mind your manners (there are quite a few helpful people in groups). Most questions people don’t want to answer really are too simple, and not worth spending time on; they’ll usually point you in a direction and let you research it yourself, because that’s how they came up, and that’s how they learned their experience. Also note that you shouldn’t keep agonizing over unimportant problems — that just wastes a lot of time. When I was searching Baidu for answers, I often came across vague authors who explained problems from their own perspective and in their own way of understanding, which for most people just starting out with PHP was completely incomprehensible and left them anxious. Sometimes a method only works on Windows and not on Linux — after all, the two have their differences. So if you’re someone who has spent the time to understand or master how to solve certain problems, when you write a blog post, please consider the people with no PHP background and describe things in as much detail as you can. Besides, most people who learn PHP come to it from another field, without formal classes; schools don’t offer courses in this area either, so most of them never learned the fundamentals. You should understand the basics first before asking questions — then it’s easier to communicate with others. During development you’ll often be stuck for days on some problem, such as forgetting to add a semicolon or forgetting to add quotes. This requires PHP developers to have good code-writing habits, paying attention from the very start. Also, get more exposure to the requirements of SEO code optimization in your day-to-day work, and write code following that direction as much as possible, to save time on later optimization. When doing secondary development, note that if the source code is a real mess with no comments, then you should develop it yourself from scratch and not waste time on the source code. Some problems you can’t figure out can be set aside for a while before you look into them again — by then you’ll find it all suddenly becomes clear. For PHP programmers just starting out, choosing your job well is essential, especially with regard to your future development; in particular, don’t go into maintenance work — it’s bad for your own growth. Especially at small companies with just one programmer, they’ll basically treat you as an errand boy. At work, pay attention to keeping your mood in balance, don’t deliberately bottle things up — go out for some fresh air and relax now and then. PHP development is very dull at the beginning, and a single problem can sometimes really drive you crazy. Finally, best wishes to all the developers like us: keep a good mood, and write more blog posts that look after beginners. Keep it up, PHP developers.