What to learn to be a better developer

Nov 11, 2014 Jacob Mather Programming No Comments

Back in 2013, I gave a brief talk at php[tek] which was about all of the things you need to learn along the way to be a developer. I promised I would put up the list from my notes — and as you can see from the date, I pretty much failed on that promise. However! I found the notes! So without further adu…

PHP Coder

• Broaden your general PHP knowledge
  • PDO
  • Namespaces
  • OOP
  • PSR-0 (and other PHP-FIG initiatives)
• Code versioning (Git, SVN, anything…)
• Dependency Managers (Composer!)

PHP Developer

• Design Patterns
• SPL
• Unit testing
• Basics of encryption
  • Public and private key encryption specifically
• Code smells

Web Developer

• Javascript
  • OOP, see the Javascript Object Playground
  • Scope management
  • Design patterns
  • Frameworks
• HTML & CSS
• UI integration tests
• Protocols
  • HTTP
  • HTTPS
  • SMTP
  • TCP
  • UDP
• Learn about build automation tools (phing, make, ant, jenkins, travis)
• Learn about deployment automation (capistrano, dploy.io, etc…)
• Pick up some solid Linux administration skills
• Code smells (MOAR!)

Software Developer

• Pick up more languages
  • Ruby, Python, C++, Objective-C … of course, I’m a bit of a language nerd…
• More design patterns
• More code smells
• Better your testing approach
• Programming styles
  • Procedural
  • Imperative
  • Functional
  • Object Oriented
  • Event Driven
• Build on a new type of platform (notice the “web” in “Web Developer” went away up there?)
  • Build a desktop, or mobile app.
  • Build a server daemon.
  • Build command line tools.
• Learn to do Security Model assessment

Software Evangelist

1. Pick a new thing to learn, and learn it!
2. Teach others what you just learned
3. GOTO 1