Today, I was cut in layoffs. I’m so gutted because I loved this company, & my team was the best; I’ll miss my team most.
Now, as I look ahead, I’m searching for a staff/principal role where I can help other developers level-up through mentoring, tooling/infra, architecture, & improving DX. I’d love to work with a company contributing to open source & even to the #PHP programming language itself.
Update (27 Feb 2024): Thanks, everyone! I’ve accepted an offer. Please see update in thread below.
@ramsey you are one of the greatest engineers I've ever had the pleasure to work with and I too will miss our team the most. Together, you, I and the rest of platform were the GOAT.
If anyone is able to hire both myself and Ben we absolutely promise to you that we will bring your team to unfathomable heights. 🙇♀️
I know others are not so fortunate, and many have been out of work far longer than I was. I cannot imagine how I would have kept it together much longer.
Give everyone a healthy measure of grace. It’s rough out there.
If I can be of help to anyone (e.g., networking/contacts, advice for resumes/interviews/job offers, referrals, etc.), feel free to ask. I will try to help where I can. (2/2)
“Ever since #PHP 7 came out, and with the improvements in the language since then—particularly around performance—PHP outshines basically every other application stack on the web. So, if you’re worried about performance and you’re worried about developer productivity, you should be choosing PHP.”
— Matthew Weier O’Phinney ( @mwop ), “The 2024 State of PHP Development,” Zend by Perforce ( @zend )
This whole job-search experience has left me quite jaded and cynical. I don’t think I’ll look at my open source contributions the same way again. I’ve never contributed for the sake of putting it on my resume, but I now know for certain that absolutely no one cares about your open source contributions. Managers and engineers will use as much open source as they can to do their work, but they have absolutely no care about who makes it or how it comes to be. It’s all magical, free labor to them.
@ramsey the lack of supporting open source financially from businesses. Is it due to how people are approaching the business to support it? Or is it that no one is really putting a financial effort? Would more businesses be open if they were asked and presented in a way that helps so a positive ROI in supporting it? I hope that makes more sense
OH: “A lot of the stuff that Python gets praised for being fast at, PHP now outperforms Python at doing, but it’s a story we’re not really telling. We should be telling that story.” #PHPTek#HallwayTrack#PHP
@ramsey the biggest thing I like Python for is data science. If we had the equivalents of numpy and pandas in PHP, it would go a long way. Even further proper Spark integration and CUDA support.
I'm not super strong in C but I'd love to work with someone to see if we could tackle any of these things and give PHP a fighting chance against Python for DS.
The latest issue of @phparch magazine is out. I still hear from many folks who aren’t aware of this magazine or the books, training, conferences, podcasts, etc. they produce, so consider this your intro to their ecosystem of content.
This open source #PHP-based #podcast hosting platform is Fediverse-enabled. If you use it to host and publish your postcast, listeners on Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms can follow your podcast and get updates delivered right to their home feeds. Check it out! @Castopod
@ramsey@Castopod is there a similar tool for podcast listeners? Something on fedi where I can subscribe to podcasts, listen, comment, share episodes on the fediverse, follow fellow listeners, etc.
iPods no longer being related to podcasting, though? I think that matters about as much as phone and save icons no longer featuring devices we actually use.
@ramsey@krinkle I think this article really nails it down with its conclusion:
"PHP hits a certain Goldilocks sweetspot. It is pretty fast, has a large community for productivity, features modern syntax, is actively developed, easy to learn, easy to scale, and has a large standard library. It offers high and safe concurrency at scale, yet without async complexity or blocking a main thread. It also tends to carry low maintenance cost due to a stable platform, [...] and low dependency count."
So much of the #PHP community relies on @shivammathur’s work, whether you’re using setup-php with GitHub Actions or his Homebrew tap for builds of PHP 5.6 through 8.3-dev. What he does is no small feat, and it helps the rest of us get our jobs done.
@ramsey While I generally agree (and in regard to other charitable work), I think we can't discount that even if you do FOSS with proper financial backing, the toxicity that developer communities tend to breed will still drive out and burn people up fast. Properly funding FOSS developers is 1/2 (a good half) of a two part problem we face in dealing maintaining our Software commons. That said, Let's not make perfection be the enemy of progress because it would be a good step.
@ramsey@Crell Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm fairly happy it's mostly EU based administrated. Or at least that's a feeling, with so many other foundations being (mostly) weighted towards the US.
The PHP CC people had also been planning a similar organisation for the best part of a decade. But sometimes it just falls into place due to external factors, such as Nikita leaving Jetbrains.
Do I know any software engineers who work at at Chess.com?
LinkedIn says I don’t, but maybe I’m connected to someone here who works there. If so, please DM me. I have some questions about a job posting, and maybe you can help.
@ramsey as someone who’s not a fan of the massive overuse and of final everywhere, I think you actually have a very valid use case here. It is getting very frustrating that final is used on everything.
And, yes, I’m an advocate of composition over inheritance in most cases. Even so, I’ve run into situations where a simple, quick extension of a class that is almost perfect would be just fine and call it a day. But, it was declared final so that can’t be done.
@ramsey Alright you got me! I've been on the fence for a while and finally pulled the trigger. Will figure out if I can expense it later. 😂 See you there!
@ramsey I don't know if the PHP team or the Docker team is responsible for the "official" docker images. But the Docker images are on hub.docker.com are still the previous release.