11 Jul 2017

What a senior PHP developer should know in 2017

This post is my opinion about what I think a senior PHP developer should know in 2017. The main reason for me to write this post is to help developers better understand their own knowledge and if they are missing something to hit the next level in their carriers.

An important note is that this post is not the universal truth about what a senior PHP developer should know. Keep this in mind and enjoy the reading.

Of course the number one requirement is a good understanding about the PHP language. You don’t need to know the deepest details about the language, but you should know it well to feel comfortable reading source files and you should know where to find documentation and help when you need. Yes, senior developers also look for usage example and learn from them, so do not be afraid to search for answers online, just be sure to be able to tell apart the good sources of information from the not good ones. When in doubt go for the official manual and take a look on PHP the Right Way from time to time.

PHP 7 is out there for quite a while now and even 7.1 is available as a stable release, so you should know what the new 7.x family brings to the table. Speed is the number one item that every PHP developer knows, but things like the null coalesce operator, the scalar type declarations and the usage of exceptions in place of the errors are super useful and can make your code more secure and reliable.

Using composer to manage the dependencies of your application should be the default way to manage dependencies for you and simple tricks like adding custom scripts to composer should also not be a mystery. It is also important to know the difference between the commands install and update and why it is important to commit the composer.lock file to your version control. I won’t give you the answer here ;-)

And by the way, it is 2017, a developer should be able to use versioning tools like Git, Mercurial and others. Branching, merging and solving conflicts should be natural actions for a senior developer.

You also need to know the main frameworks out there and the differences between them. Should I use Symfony to build a landing page that will be discarded in a few weeks? Or is CakePHP a better option for that? Maybe it is Yii or Laravel? The important thing here is not to be locked inside one framework’s toolset and capabilities. The reason we have so many frameworks in the wild is because people and projects have different needs. And here we can apply that saying: If all you have is a hammer, all your problems will look like nails.

Recognizing and implementing design patterns is also a must. A senior developer knows one should not exactly start a project saying something like “I will use a Strategy pattern here”, one should rather recognize where the patterns are the solution for the task in hand. Of course, at some point developers are able to recognise such situations earlier in the process, but a rule of thumb, in my opinion, is that patterns emerge from the design, they are not pushed into the design.

A senior PHP developer should be able to write unit tests for untested code and refactor it. Our industry is in constant change and tools and libraries are constantly evolving. Being able to remove an unmaintained library from a code base and replace it with another one is a really nice skill to have. A hard one because it requires investigation and patience usually, but it is still a skill that not all devs have because we as developers usually want to replace code with what is new and better (and will become old and worse in some months/years, but no one remembers this part usually).

And talking about tests, a senior developer should be able to write tests and also to practice techniques like Test Driven Development. Mocking other systems and APIs should not be a mysterious thing.

Development is cool, but you also have to deploy your code to production so people can actually use it. Although it is possible to deploy code using FTP this should not be the only option you know. Specialized deployment tools are not hard to find and you can always get some experience with some SaaS deployment pipeline tools. Capistrano is a Ruby tool mostly used to deploy Ruby on Rails applications, but you can also use it for PHP and there are even some plugins for frameworks like Symfony. Ant is a long time favorite of mine to automate tasks, including deployment scripts. Fabric is a Python tool that can also be used to deploy PHP applications and there is also Deployer for the ones who want to keep everything in the PHP world.

After deployment you should be able to understand how your applications behave in production, so you need monitoring tools like NewRelic, Datadog and Sentry, that are SaaS tools that can be easily integrated into your servers and applications. There are also self-hosted free options like the excellent ELK stack.

Caching is another important skill. Understanding where to apply a caching technique may be the difference between having a nice and fast user experience or a slow one where the servers are always on fire while the customer is waiting for the page to load. And users will not wait for the page to load, they will look for something else. Remember caching exists in different flavours and it is important do know what, when and where to use cache, from code the cdn.

Important: Do not depend on the company you are working for to learn new things. If you don’t have the chance to learn unit tests in your current position, you can do it at home, building some personal project. The same applies for everything else. Nowadays it is super easy to setup a GNU/Linux virtual machine where you can play around and practice new skills that may be useful for your current work or to get a new one. You can always get a $10 credit on Digital Ocean to deploy your applications and setup deployment pipelines using tools like GitHub, BitBucket and Codeship.

Senior developers should also have good communication skills and be able to understand the business of the companies they work for. Let’s be realistic, a really small number of us are working for Google, GitHub, Atlassian, Oracle and other software centered companies. We are working for online shops, banks, web agencies and other lots of companies that are doing businesses online and depend on a solid platform to stay alive but not exactly will put loads of money into that rewriting you want to do to get rid of the legacy system you hate with a passion. So, try to understand the business and align the technical needs with the business to create a win-win situation, because bad code can also destroy a company.

An important note: You don’t have to be perfect and know all the things I listed here from the top of your mind, but you should be able to understand all the concepts and to look for help in the right places.

This page from the folks at Toptal is also a good resource for learning some specific topics that you may not know yet.

Do you think I missed something in this post? The PHP community is a really large one and senior developers will come in all shapes and sizes, so help me expand this post by adding your thoughts in the comments bellow.

InFog.