About PHP skill | Skills worked as a Lead Developer in PHP ecosystem for more than a decade designed and developed one commercial CMS, one open-source CMF, contributed in couple… What I did with it
worked as a Lead Developer in PHP ecosystem for more than a decade
designed and developed one commercial CMS, one open-source CMF, contributed in couple others
played with almost everything PHP-related
once made a robotic arm controlled by PHP banging GPIO
have my own finely-tuned PHP image that beats official in benchmarks (TBA)
What I think
I love PHP
PHP is the new COBOL
I hate PHP
We should be thankful for having it in our lives
And never use it for new projects, please
Related Experiences What I did
Designed and developed a system for tracking visits, clicks and leads for affiliate programs
Zero-effort integration: any e-commerce site could gain affiliate functionality with a couple of hooks
What I achieved
Besides project completion, I made an algorithm that coarsens data depending on the server load
The bigger your site is, the coarser the data (up to a limit), so response time and resource consumption stayed near-constant
We successfully processed statistics with mixed precision after collection
Data scientists probably do it every day now, but in the early 2010s they hadn’t been invented yet
The idea was inspired by time dilation in EVE Online
What I learned
How to respond fast
Data structures are not holy artifacts
Dirty data is better than no data at all
What I did
Built and managed a separate department: developers, sysops, QA and even one tech writer
Led development of an integrated system for interaction between citizens and city services / utilities
Payment processing, emergency handling, and compliance and regulation control across a whole bunch of small departments, companies, vendors, etc.
What I achieved
Despite all the efforts of the government customers, we successfully delivered it, and as far as I know, it still works
Got promoted to CTO
What I learned
The only thing less efficient than a typical municipality is the same municipality at night
What I did
Developed a “retail” closed-source PHP CMS/CMF
Brought my print media experience to digital publishing: one of the first CMSes with drafts, notes, collaborative editing and real workflows (with sign-offs)
What I achieved
Dragged it to the first release and real consumer sites
Realized that open source is the future
What I learned
How to make something for specific audiences — other developers, media and SEO people
What I did
Developed a system that allowed investors to buy and sell shares in various non-traditional assets
In short, you could “IPO” your business, website, or even a cow, if you wanted. Any income source.
We had dividends, splits and merges, direct exchange between assets and a lot of other machinery for all the roles
Something like modern tokenization, but centralized and in the pre-Bitcoin era
The founder came with this raw idea and I brought this project to production, solo
What I achieved
Made a fully working product with many ideas ahead of their time (we even had proto-passkeys!)
Chose a perfect time to quit
What I learned
How to build systems working with money
What to do when your client decides to build a Ponzi scheme based on your beautifully crafted exchange system, and gets himself in prison for fraud
How to spot exploitable parts of systems
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