Starting A New Life
It seems a little strange that I am posting this now, several months after having moved to Florida, even a month after moving to Clearwater. It seems additionally strange that I am posting it under technical stuff, perhaps, but I suppose that is how it all makes sense, too. My family has nicely settled into our new apartment in Clearwater, FL after several trying months of unemployment followed by a terrible commute to my new and present place of employment and generally just trying to get to where we need to be. We are, without a doubt, happy here, and I am now looking at some self-improvement.
I could definitely talk about exercise, diet, what I am doing for my kung fu at the moment and such, but really, I’ve talked a lot about in the past handful of posts and I feel kind of silly rehashing it. Some of that comes with me quite simply not having done near enough as of late. So, instead I want to talk about PHP. If you don’t know what that is, that’s fine. You can probably move on at this point because that’s the more common acronym I’m going to toss out here, which is why I’m going with Technical Stuff as my category. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended.
As you may know, I am a web developer and I work primarily with PHP and MySQL databases, preferring a Linux OS and Apache web server environment. Even some of the people out there who don’t have a clue what that all means know that about me. I have been doing exactly this in a full time capacity for a variety of companies over the past ten years now. Prior to that I had some amount of web programming experience, mostly with Perl CGI scripts, much of which I honestly just took on faith to work as expected and knew little about. In all of this, my experience has been primarily Procedural Programming.
While job hunting, recently, I began to realize that though I may love and defend Procedural Programming, Object Oriented Programming has become the industry standard. This, along with a realization that my SQL experience leaned toward the elementary, certainly put a damper on my job search, and I genuinely do not wish to find myself in that difficult position again. Thankfully, I did secure employment, and I hope my job with this new company will prove to be one that I can continue to do well in for some time to come. Regardless, I have decided it is time to catch up. After all, even staying with this company, I should do what I can to be sure they are also current.
So, the items I have noted out there that seem to be desirable include the following:
- OOP PHP
- Familiarity with MVC
- Familiarity with PHP Frameworks
- AJAX
It just so happens, that often this list also includes mention of Codeigniter as a framework. Codeigniter happens to be a PHP framework that is based on the MVC model of application design, built with OOP PHP in mind. It is an Open Source project, so there is no cost to pick it up and work with it. Making use of this leaves only AJAX as the odd bit out, but let’s face it, AJAX is everywhere these days, so it’s not like I will lack any opportunities to use it. Really, I have picked up a little bit of JQuery anyway, and that seems to be one of the preferred libraries. I will just keep with that.
So the question then was what to do. How can I get to work on a reasonably difficult project that will allow me to use Codeigniter with JQuery both to be able to learn and show proficiency. The answer hit me tonight, after several ideas I really didn’t care for that I had mulled over for the past couple weeks. Some ten years ago I accepted my first full time web development/management job working for a fantastic company that sold stock and custom home plans and also offered consultation services with home plan designers to help choose the plan that is right for the customer and do modifications as necessary. They were a great company to work with and I owe a lot to them. I made great friends there, and at a later date, a new company was born and these people asked me about doing web design work for them. I did them the disservice of saying yes. I say this was a disservice because some years later, I have yet to actually give the web site the attention it needs and launch for them. As we are still at that starting point, I feel like this is the perfect time for me to make amends and build them the best home plans web site ever.
So, with Codeigniter at the ready, I’m stepping up to finally creating this site. I already know most of what will need to be done and this week my to do list is filled with various planning tasks to make sure I have a good road map for the weeks ahead of me. Hang on, Jack and Rik. It’s going to be a wild ride, but I will get us there!