How to Manage a PHP Project that Will Have a Long Life - 10 Minutes of the Lately in PHP Podcast Episode 89 part 1

Introduction to the podcast and RingCentral.com (0m 17s)

Introduction of Mike Stowe and Nomad PHP (2m 34s)

Introduction of Manuel Lemos and the long life of PHP and the PHP Classes site (3m 34s) 

The Actual Transcript

Introduction to the podcast and RingCentral.com (0m 17s)

Manuel Lemos: Hello, welcome to the Lately in PHP podcast, after many years of absence.
We have been working a lot on many things, and this is the return of the Jedi... no.

This is the return of common PHP developers like myself, but I have now a great company,
Mike Stowe from the Nomad PHP fame.

We are going to try to make this time useful and nice for you to watch or listen or read, maybe if we do a transcript, you can also read what we are saying.

I hope it will be useful and we'll be talking a lot of PHP and a lot of the  latest developments and hopefully a bit about the future.

But first I would like to introduce you to Mike Stowe. For those that don't know him he is very famous but he's a very humble person and probably you won't know the many great things he had done.

But for that it's better that he tells us what he has been doing, who he is, and whatever he thinks it's best to tell now about his work and it's participation in the PHP community.

Thank you Mike for this participation.

Mike Stowe: For who has to listen to me ramble, essentially Manuel was like: hey we should do this podcast. I'm like: man a chance for me to talk more that's exactly what everybody on the planet absolutely wants is to listen to me.

But before I do an intro to me, I have to give a shout out to my my real employer who is sponsoring today's episode, so I don't get in trouble.

That is a quick thank you to RingCentral for sponsoring the Lately in PHP podcast. If you have not heard of RingCentral, RingCentral offers full cloud communications, so we're talking messaging, video, phone in the cloud.

And they have a bunch of APIs that allow you to connect and build your own applications on top of their RingCentral MVP platform.

So definitely check them out at ringcentral.com and the developer platform at developers.ringcentral.com .

Introduction of Mike Stowe and Nomad PHP (2m 34s)

And with that out of the way, I'll do a quick intro for those that that don't know me. For those that do, I apologize, usually they wish they didn't.

But my name is Mike Stowe. I've had the privilege of taking over Nomad PHP from the great Cal Evans and trying to build a community of learning where people can really can come in attend live meetups, stream live conferences that they might not be able to go to otherwise, or cannot afford to go to a lot of conferences out there.

So I want to bring conferences to people right where they are at via the stream, books and resources, professional certification and more.

So all that's available at nomadphp.com . And outside that my biggest disclaimer is I'm from Minnesota, I have originally... I'm not in California but I have a terrible Minnesota accent so you will hear things like oh yeah don't you know oh sure you betcha right here on the stream and also if you can't tell, I think I'm funny. Most other people do not. So I apologize for my sense of humor.

Introduction of Manuel Lemos and the long life of PHP and the PHP Classes site (3m 34s) 

Manuel Lemos: Yeah. Well exciting but for me it's common because it's kind of my life for the last 22 years. I started the PHP Classes site in 1999. It was a very long time ago.

I'm really an ancient person despite my hair is black, I have a few gray hair, not many but some people do not believe that I'm 53. And a great part of my life like, 22 years, have been around the PHP community.

The PHP community is great. It's huge. And they work a lot.
There are a few noisy people but most of us work in silence because they are focused on developing great work.

All of those are heroes because they have been contributing to make the PHP community better.
As you may know, PHP was started by Rasmus. But then Rasmus shared his work with others.

Others got interested, wanted to collaborate. From then on, PHP has been growing growing a lot. I don't even know how many PHP developers there are.

Maybe there are 7 million. I don't have current figures, so people say PHP is dying.
OK, let them say that. Mike Stowe: I actually I interrupt you  because I have two answers for you.
The first is how many PHP developers? Not enough, because it's fantastic language. And in terms of is PHP dying, and this is a shameless plug, I actually just wrote a blog post on this on NomadPHP.

And I can safely say that while the number of Web sites using PHP has declined mostly because there's a ton more Web sites are using different languages or more Web sites out there, PHP is still powering something like 83% of the top 10 000 Web sites or something like that.
Like, it's a ridiculous number. So, no right now PHP is not dying.

Manuel Lemos: no no. So everybody wants to shift from PHP to Ruby or Python or whatever. They are also a nice languages. We have to admit that.

The developers that created them and evolved them, they also work hard. So we respect the 
developers that prefer other languages.

Those are just preferences. We have ours. They have theirs.  And what I always say is that you should pick the language, or the tools, the frameworks, or the coding styles, that make you productive.

But ultimately it's up to you to produce your work. It's not up to me. If you use a different framework it's up to you.

Use Laravel. Use Zend framework. Use YII, Simfony, well, many of them. It's up to you. If you make a wrong choice for you, the penalty is for you. So if you don't agree with my preferences, that's fine. So those are your practices I have to respect. But OK. But let's move on .

Mike Stowe: I just want to comment that really quickly Manuel, if you don't mind because 
I think that's so important about choice.

And for me, you can use any framework you want as long as it's Cake.

Manuel Lemos: Sorry, I forgot to mention Cake.

And I say that because they're all... there's so many great tools that serve different purposes. You know, that's the thing people lose sight of is, you know, whether you're Symfony, or whether you're Laminas or whether you're YII, or whatever it may be, you have to choose the tools that are right for you.

And that's the other thing that you know we'll pick on different languages, as a PHP developer it doesn't hurt to understand the different languages because there are things that other languages excel  at that PHP doesn't excel out, you know.

Go is great for running server components, such as Kubernetes or containerization. Java has its place. Python for machine learning.

An then PHP of course is the most dominant language on the web for a reason. So I think we lose sight of: use the best tool for the job.

And to your point, use the tools to help you succeed. And if you make a wrong decision, as Manuel put very eloquently, well, that's your price to pay.

Manuel: Yes, yes. We are also machines that do mistakes. But the important is not just be depressed because we did mistakes but fix your mistakes as soon as possible, and repeat what went well.

And that's how you will progress. For the latest years I've been working a lot. I don't mention much outside what I do because those are details of implementation. They are not important for others. It's internal.

But the result is great. But it comes slow. It comes slow also because currently I work mainly alone, but that will eventually change. But I'm not always alone.

If you think PHP Classes content was contributed by over 4400 developers that shared work for the benefit of almost 1 million and 600 thousand developers, it's a lot of people. But it's still a fraction of the whole PHP community. There is a great part that does not use PHP classes.

And that's fine. It's up to them. But there is a part that uses it, enjoys it, and loves it, and takes advantage of it, makes money, and be happy. All that in whatever order you prefer. But that's OK.

That is just to tell a bit about what we have today. But we need to talk more about the PHP community itself, not just about PHP Classes because as I said, it's just a fraction of the whole community.