I’ve been a Full Stack Developer at Jump for not quite a year now, starting in May 2023, but web development as a whole has been a passion of mine for a lot longer than that.
For my 12th birthday in 2001 I was given a Harry Potter book by my aunt and uncle, at the time I’d not heard of the series (The first film didn’t come out until November 2001!) and I remember unwrapping it, and thinking ‘oh, a book… great…’ and saying to myself it’ll get put somewhere and never see the light of day again, but over the next few weeks my aunt and uncle persuaded me to read it with them when they visited at weekends and I become hooked. I began looking online for Harry Potter things and found fansites, and I wanted to make my own, so I learnt how, and that’s where this passion for web development came from.
I first started playing around in Microsoft Frontpage (Those were the days!) and started learning basic HTML, I remember the feeling I got the first time I uploaded a website over FTP and other people being able to see it! A couple of years later in 2004 I started looking into PHP, I did my school work experience with a PHP Developer who taught me some of the basics and I just went from there, and I decided pretty early on that this is what I want to do in life, make websites, write code, and that amazing feeling when it all comes together and works.
I started college in 2005 and did a BTEC followed by a HND and in both courses I got top marks on the web development and later software development modules.
Throughout the next few years, I was still writing PHP, HTML and CSS a lot, and later learnt Javascript and jQuery, but mainly sticking with ‘vanilla’ PHP, so no framework, no libraries, then at a previous job in 2018 I was introduced to Laravel, this was a whole new world for me, I struggled to adapt at first, and I got referred to Laracasts and the fantastic courses that Jeffrey Way has done over the years, I spent weeks watching literally every video on the platform in my spare time (Something I still do now 6 years later!) and I say it was then that my life (Or at least my professional life) changed – I became hooked on the Laravel framework, the tooling it provided, the clean code and coding standards it introduced and encouraged, which later became a key passion of mine, writing clean, well structured and well typed code, and later thanks again to Laracasts I learnt about testing with PHPUnit and TDD (Test Driven Development) and even VueJS and Tailwind, which now in 2024 are all keys parts of my arsenal when it comes to the code I write, and my favourite ‘stack’ of tooling to work with, Laravel along with Larastan, Pint and PHPUnit, coupled with VueJS and Tailwind for the frontend, and occasionally InertiaJS too to join it all together.
Why I love what I do
Unlike a lot of other fields, web development, and even software development in general is constantly changing and evolving, what might be common practice now could literally get replaced in 6 months, even in the Laravel community for example, years ago it was common to use Blade for the frontend aspects of your app, and while that is still the case in a lot of projects, it’s more common these days for projects to fall under the Laravel + Inertia + Vue stack, or the Livewire stack.
To some people, the constant risk that the way you’ve done something for years could change could be scary, and even for me in any other aspect of my life it would be, but with development, it’s different, in the nearly 20 years I’ve been writing PHP, I’ve seen it come along way, even in just 10 or even 5 years it’s all completely changed with new features coming into the language that make it a pleasure to work with.
You’re always learning something new, even in the time I’ve been here I’ve learnt so much that I’ve applied to my work, new techniques that I might have not considered or discovered as quick in my own personal projects.
With Laravel too, it’s a bit cliche now, but the community is amazing, there are people all over the world that are as passionate about Laravel as we are, there’s people out there creating fantastic tooling that helps the framework and the PHP community in general, PHPUnit and Pest for testing, PHPStan/Larastan for static analysis, Laravel Pint/PHP CS Fixer/PHP ECS for code linting and style enforcement… all of those tools are written in PHP and also make your own PHP code better, something like that for me a few years ago would be crazy to think about!
Using Laravel, with a few commands you can have an app ready to go in minutes, with a full authentication system and more, it’s the perfect starting point for building your application. Spend a few more minutes and install and configure some community packages and your application will now be battle ready, your code will be linted to enforce a style guide, your app will be statically analysed to find any issues with your code, and your application is ready for automated tests to ensure that your core business logic and features work as they should.
What’s next?
When I joined Jump last year I was thrilled to have found and joined a company, and a team of people, that are as passionate about Laravel as I am, and I’ve loved every second I’ve been here, I’ve met some amazing people, worked on some amazing projects, and learnt a lot in the process!
Dan, Adam and the team have some great ideas of where the business could be in the years to come, and I can’t wait to be a part of that and see it happen, and to see us become a well known, influential name in the Laravel Community.
I’m looking forward to getting out on the road and attending Laravel conventions and getting the opportunity to see and meet the A-List Laravel Developers around the world I’ve followed and admired online for years, maybe even one day do a small talk of my own?
I can’t wait to see what happens next in the Laravel world, the next major version, Laravel 11 is just around the corner, there’s been hints at exciting new features and first party packages coming soon, will any of them be a game changer?
And most importantly, I can’t wait to continue to grow and learn more, to work with the fantastic team here every single day, on a variety of different exciting projects, and to see what comes next for everyone here!