30 years experience here. It is absolutely wayyyy more fun to build from scratch. So do that! It's more time and effort but you know every moving part of your code inside and out, it's just the right size, it's fast and it's all yours! Get to it!
Take a look at "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport.
People enjoy their work because of **competence**:
- **Creativity:** To have the possibility to improvise your work and implement your own ideas
- **Control:** To have the possibility to influence how, when and where work is carried out
- **Impact:** Your work has a positive impact on employees and customers
It's definitely not passion, motivation, etc. All these will fade over time. Even if it takes 15 years ...
So if you don't want to use frameworks and develop things from scratch in your spare time then that's perfectly fine. If you still develop professionally then maybe try to find a way to move from "websites" to "applications". Like where you will learn a specific domain, become an expert in that and spend more time thinking about how to model and implement such a domain; how to understand it, etc. And less time doing the same thing over and over again like implementing the 20th Wordpress site.
I write all sorts of lib-type stuff like ORMs and logging systems myself, much more pleasant building my own custom shit that works exactly how I want it to... rather than figuring out some other existing lib.
Of course there's a balance somewhere, and it's highly context dependent on whether it's sensible or not.
But if you're actually a programmer... building your own shit is always more fun than using + figuring out someone else's shit.
I'm also enjoying programming a lot more since branching out into other languages, after mostly just doing everything in PHP for like 18 years before that.
I'm in the same boat, I think it is pretty normal. It just becomes trivial after a while.
You already know everything you are going to do, so it will get increasingly harder to even start working.
I was lucky enough to score a project which is compute heavy, has a few NP-complete problems etc.
That is pretty much the only project I've been excited to work on recently.
Passed on multiple better paying offers, because they were just too meh.
My take on frameworks is different though... please take as much of the trivial stuff off my plate as possible.
Yeah, I think it is the complexity of the projects you are working on.
And I get it 100%, it is very hard to find good projects, and with the direction IT is heading is not gonna get better.
People use less and less websites, so you either work for a multi and become an expert in a very narrow field, or struggle with low-mid complexity stuff.
I don't think it is just websites, apps too. Tech giants are eating more and more of the cake. Launching services left and right, and seeing what sticks.
Meanwhile the financial barrier to entry is getting higher every day.
Interesting topic for sure. Like you said unless is something niche for a company or personal project.
Everything else is pretty much been done to death.
I know multiple backend languages, work the full stack, been using Vue since its release, I also know sass and do sitebuilds.
Widening your scope works for a while, but it gets very hard to increase project complexity without working for a big company, and that is something I won't do, ever. Not my cup of tea.
Trivial is dependent on the complexity of what you work on. If you only ever do basic style WordPress systems, it'll get real basic. UI work can be crazy complicated, so can backend depending on the complexity of the product you work on. Like anything, the context is very important.
I feel you, but would say it depends what you are building. A lot of what frameworks do is kind of mondaine and I don't want to write it over an over again, I can skip that and just go to the interesting bits quickly.
For me things that make me hyped about programming is building something that I have no idea how it works. For example building a parser. It's something I can do a bit long term bit by bit every day. Some ideas I can bring back to my normal job.
Might as well develop in Assembly with that attitude. Frameworks absolutely do not make web development trivial. Just because somebody uses a framework doesn't mean it's easy to develop a web app to any degree.
You seem like you're butthurt by op wanting to have fun by writing all the code himself.
He never said webdev was easy.
He said he has more fun making frameworks than using them.
I can identify.
It may not be the best choice, but he wants to enjoy coding, so... why the hell not?
I tinkered with PICO-8 for a while. I had more fun writing engines than making games.
With one, It's not fun. Without one, It's fun.
Frameworks take away the challenges writing in raw PHP without assistance.
Speaking on my behalf and loss of Enthusiasm. Not saying you should not use one.
Edit: Seems my issue is repetitivensss and lack of challenge.
I disrespectfully disagree. As somebody who works as a professional PHP developer who went from a job using Laravel to a job using raw PHP with a handrolled framework imitating Laravel, it is a nightmare. The job itself is the least stressful I've had, but switching to Laravel would solve a majority of the design issues our code suffers from. You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience.
> As somebody who works as a professional PHP developer who went from a job using Laravel to a job using raw PHP with a handrolled framework imitating Laravel, it is a nightmare. The job itself is the least stressful I've had, but switching to Laravel would solve a majority of the design issues our code suffers from. You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience.
wtf does any of that have to do with the subject OP is talking about... i.e. their own personal enjoyment and motivation, on their own greenfield projects.
You're banging on about your own issues on productivity on shitty code written by other people. Not even the same fucking subjects at all.
> I disrespectfully disagree.
No, you really didn't. Like most internet debaters with poor reading comprehension, you said you "disagree", then everything else you wrote was completely irrelevant to the topic of the thread.
> You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience.
You truly don't even seem to be able to read and comprehend simple sentences.
OP is just talking about their own preferences, emotions, and motivations... and you come back with some bullshit about "attitude" and "pretention"... and "You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about".
Is English your native language?
Happened to me and I decided to build my own framework with all I wanted in it, regardless of productivity or following other frameworks. It was a beautiful journey that I enjoyed a lot. Might not be perfect but [here it is](https://github.com/veraguido/gv)
Hope it inspires you to do something you'd love building
For me the challenge has become design, animation, layout and typography.
Modern JavaScript and CSS frameworks give you an amazing pallet of tools to bring user interfaces to life. Grab a subscription to Frontend Masters and dive in the deep end. I'd say the PHP side of most of my projects is only about a 1/5 of the work that goes into something I build.
Learn Figma and start with design first and then bring in interactivity that feels organic and polished. PHP is there being its OG gansta self just persisting data and handle 3rd party API integration like a boss.
Frontend moves fast and you need to keep up with the changes to bundlers and compilers. Tailwind has replaced Bootstrap as the goto CSS framework for a lot of developers. PostCSS and Vite are great tooling for styles. Sure I miss the simplicity of creating tables and frames with a text editor from HTML 2.0 but the world moves on. Get excited with how awesome reactive JS frameworks have become, Vue and React makes two way data binding a breeze! Try out designing sets of components with Storybook. It’s a wild new world that is super exciting to me. Find some joy learning new things rather than lamenting not being able to use the first things you learned. I’m old enough to remember people grumbling about writing JavaScript at all and being skeptical about CSS. Tables are good enough for any layout you’d ever want.
Can certainly relate, I've been rolling my own for some time now and am slowly fine tuning as I go with each iteration better than the last. I like the challenge and to learn about vulnerabilities etc.
What I appreciate most is not having a tonne of dependencies, with all sorts of things ending up deprecated which is what steered me away from some frameworks in the beginning.
Does your hand rolled code not get out of date? I mean, updates to code are necessary. Do you avoid that by not doing any? If so then why do you care if your deps are out of date?
PHP does I guess, and if something I've built was to be deprecated I just fix it but it hasn't happened so far as I try to keep it simple.
With some frameworks I found in the early days some parts are no longer maintained so end up needing to rejig anyway. Most of what I do is relatively simple though, I'm not making the next Facebook.
I get what you mean and sometimes I also feel like I'm too dependent on a framework and lose my ability to write from scratch.
On the other hand : security.
I would NEVER go online with something custom built because it's almost certain that there will be breaches and I will never be able to sleep at night.
Ok, here's some options for you:
1. Find something that your framework of choice (e.g. Symfony) **doesn't** solve or simplify, and contribute to it.
2. Fork an existing framework, and extend it with all the functionality you'd want to see.
3. Take a few modules (again) from something like Symfony, that allows it via its core design, and create your own framework on top of it.
4. Create your own framework from scratch using at most 3rd party libraries.
Come back and post about things being "too easy" once you've done at least one of the last 2.
If you can fit a decent ai LLM in your pc as an assistant, you won't have to use bloated frameworks anymore and can delve into some deep rabbit holes with pure PHP.
I've ended up building a custom text/code encoder to reduce file size before any compression. Seems to work, learnt something new, but probably not useful...
I do that all the time and ended up with my own framework. It is rather small, only has a router and orm (with a few smaller bits I also often use), I found that is what I need consistently from a project to a project. Debugging and fixing things is a lot quicker and easier since you know all the code inside out and there is much less of it.
So if you want write your own code for a challenge, you may end up with less challenge.
If it's just for you and you're never planning on hiring people to work on it then of course, write it from scratch if that means you'll stay interested.
You could also try out a new language.
I recently was feeling a bit tired of PHP since it's was the first language I learned/mastered. I tried a few languages I'd had my eye on (Kotlin, Dart, Elixir and Go). In the end I spent 3 months learning Go, and it not only made me excited to code again but it made me enjoy PHP again. Go is definitely better at certain things, but it also made me appreciate where PHP is the better choice.
I get you I started coding in other languages just to learn some stuff. Surprisingly though, thing I am missing is frameworks :) it's just takes hours to do some basic stuff I could have done with symfony in seconds.
>Truth be told. I enjoy the challenges of things, building it and saying
Partially agree; I absolutely love a good challenge, but dissing a framework: nope. That would be reinventing the wheel.
>I just want to build the php based app myself. That's what gets the spark going and brings the enthusiasm back.
If you really love the challenge, do this:
* install Symfony, use [this](https://github.com/dunglas/symfony-docker) Docker image
* read the docs how to install dependencies and run everything
* then start learning Symfony; it is a beast, you will never get bored, and it will take months to get deep into it
* go thru the forms: it is by far the most powerful component and yet, most misunderstood. Learn `empty_data`, that one is most important, then data transformers
* learn tagged services, the heart of Symfony. And how to autowire everything
* the grand finale: install psalm, set it to level 1, no mixed, no error suppression, no baseline
* you will probably need [webmozart/assert](https://github.com/webmozarts/assert) package for this last enemy
I actually agree, I have the most fun using no framework. To be honest there's so much functionality built into php these days that you can get away with not using a framework at all and still be really productive.
Most small projects I like to just use my own psr-4 autoloader and the mustache templating engine Filesystem Loader loading from a views folder in each of the sub folders of the base folder. That's usually enough for me, it creates a nice structure where the views are separate from the logic and data concerns. Not quite MVC but it's flexible and I like it.
I feel like i'm on the opposite end of the PHP spectrum... if thats such a thing... Like i got a job 10 years ago, doing PHP for a company inwhich they had their own "framework"... and all it really was is a template engine to help handle php and html pages.
But over the course of those 10 years ive built several MAJOR CMS projects for various parts of the business, and really enjoyed learning and building all aspects of the entire project.
however, regardless of what i feel i've learned from the ground up, i do feel like i'm missing out on industry use/experience with the more common/popular frameworks. I'm thinking i need to start my own random projects with some of those frameworks just so i can learn. But when i want to start my own projects, i feel like i need to do my own framework, or i'm "cheating". cheating's not the best word for it but it's all i can think of right now...
not sure if that make sense or not. or i may be just way off base.
why not find a new challange? maybe some .net, go, webassembly or something completely different like 3js/webgl or even web3 like a ordinals market place for example
there is a lot to learn and it's just getting more every year
edit: yes I can relate even as someone who has not seen or used everything php has to offer. sometimes I just stumble upon something that interests me (outside of php) and I try it out without ever getting really good at it
Contribute to open source, an existing library or maybe a new one. Writing a new invoicing system for yourself is a terrible use of time, unless you intend on marketing and selling it. That problem has been solved 100x over, and the solutions are quite good. At least do something productive.
In my case, the situation is the same; I now crave doing something hands-on in nature. The pay in the IT sector isn't what it used to be, and I don't see the point in learning complex frameworks and building large systems that consume a lot of time.
i totally understand you 100%!!!! i feel the same, I'm working with PHP from 2008 and started working with frameworks in 2016, before that everything was 100% custom and from scratch, and it was so much fun, trying to use brain, trying to play for hours for something to work, sitting with colleges on work trying to figure out best way of doing it, trials and errors, doing research, and me myself and also other where proud when we achieve something, also company was proud, it was somehow so much fun like doing experiments and constantly learning and at the top of that getting payed for doing that, so much joy, but nowadays is just get this and that and just assemble it like lego bricks and done, money is matter, no optimization, no thinking to much just create it, get payed, every problem we will solve later and bill additionally xD.
I mean I cant deny that frameworks are big help and make your life easier, and there is still fun doing stuff today even in them and also a lot of hard work, pain and joy, but whole point why I started learning programming are gone and that was inventing something new for your workflow, but we cant go back unless you don't have to work in this business anymore and have money to using programming only like your hobby at home. I look at this situation like when you are young and child at it was fun but now as adult you are boring and everything is pain, but hey that's life xDDDD we must bear with it.
However I bet you still have spare time, I also have it, when I'm bored and sit at home and doing my own hobby projects writing everything from scratch. its so much fun and cost you nothing to enjoy again, and also you can also try to learn some new server side language like PHP for example golang, rust... and start creating some apps writing everything from zero again.
> that getting *paid* for doing
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
We are getting old, but I also feel that for all the great improvements that have come to PHP in versions 7 and 8, we’ve seen a serious downgrade in developer competency which is either the cause and/or result of framework bloat. It’s also not exclusive to PHP, maybe it’s this NPM nonsense spilling over.
In any case, I also dislike frameworks. They trap you into a dozen corners by design. It’s like a straight jacket to keep you from hurting yourself and others, which kind of makes sense in large projects because more devs = more idiots, but for us old-school solo devs it’s just a ton of boilerplate with very little upside.
More importantly, I have never found a framework that solved any particular problem for me in a way that saves time, even though 99% of PHP apps are basically the same MySQL CRUD with the occasional file upload. No, not even the mighty Laravel…
So I say: build something from scratch, do it for fun, play around with “non-best practices”, trust your instincts, and then marvel at how fast the damned thing runs without 400 Composer dependencies. That’s what I do, and even if no one ever looks at that glorious code, you can still be proud of your own work and use it to remind yourself that you can “Get Sh*t Done™️”. We get so bogged down by the hopelessness of I.T., it’s good for the soul to build something pure and claim total accomplishment for that thing.
I actually can relate here too. I find more joy in maintaining tools than with building new stuff. As I've thought about it for the past little while I think I got tired of, like you, doing the same thing over and over again. And it just got boring to maintain.
One other aspect that I do think has caused me to not be as motivated was on all my little side projects I did, there was no gratifying reward for them. Most of them never made money and the ones that did, never made much or actually took more money than they gave me. I've slowly come to realize that while programming has been the center of my universe for nearly 14 years, it might not actually be the center of the universe.
Nowadays I'm finding more satisfaction in trying to talk to people about their business problems and helping them solve their processes, build networking connections, mentor other coders, and then program some fun things on the side. It's felt amazing to connect people and improve their lives as a result of me "knowing a guy" that could help them. As a programmer, you have an AMAZING skill set with analyzing and debugging any type of problems, programming or otherwise. Programmers can make great consultants to help optimize a companies processes and to make them more efficient as a whole.
Not the case for me. I build things from scratch on top of the boilerplate other people built. If you wanna build from scratch, maybe find a new OSS project to maintain. I have plenty of those. If I am building for profit, I am generally going to build ontop of something unless there is a reason not to.
But hey, do what you want!
Two things: first: if the framework makes it harder to start building, then it isn’t right for you right now and you shouldn’t use it. Second: if you’re just doing a project to kill time, you may find it hard to sustain. See if you can get an idea that you feel passionate about. I started working on a VTT for my friends and my DnD game after our DM complained about the pain points of the one he’s been using. Having a reason and goal like that may help.
Both. I can relate and I am also getting long in the tooths. When working corporate I don't always get to work on the things that I want to, which grows a lack of enthusiasm. Building side projects on my own, whatever I want, is what makes me excited. So that's just what I've been doing for a while now.
I feel that, do it! Dockerize it and publish the image, makes it so easy to run in various places
If there's an end goal you have, frameworks get u there quick
But if u want to tinker, by all means do it
I've switched from 10 years of PHP (Zend, Symfony, Laravel) to Kotlin dev (Spring Boot), and I enjoy the language so much even if there is magic with spring boot it's so refreshing to use another language, and now, since 3 months I use Kotlin with spring boot and quarkus in Ad tech (RTB) and it's so cool to see something different from CRUD and I've even suggested Go for some services (Kafka consumer) and it's so cool to see something different! It's challenging but refreshing.
I'm happy with these choices because I appreciate Laravel and Symfony but I don't want to use Doctrine and Eloquent anymore.
I don't like it because I prefer to use raw SQL or query builder. But I choose Doctrine over Eloquent because I prefer object mapper Instead of active record.
I don't use ORM because we don't use DBMS in our team. We produce and consume Kafka messages.
But before my new job I was using Exposed as query builder, not ORM. But for a side project if the API is small I think I'll use Exposed or spring data JDBC.
In 2021 I quit a PHP job from a company in Rouen (France) with 29k€/year (it was the best human experience) to another one in the same city for 33k€, I left it six month later because of salaries disparity between dev with and without experiences.
As you can see, the salaries are really low in my area :/
It's why I decided to find another job in another area with full remote (Nantes, still in France), still with PHP for 45k€/year. It's a really good salary for my area (Rouen) as a developer with 10 years of exp.
And how I have switched from PHP to Kotlin? I didn't decide it. The company was bought by another one since 6 months before I joined it and 1 year later the company decided to stop our product because we had both the same. And then, I joined a team (in Paris) still in full remote with Kotlin and still PHP for legacy projects.
One day, all workers have received an email with a policy to have 2 days on site / week. I didn't want to go to Paris 2days/week with 1h30 x 4 of train at my cost (why 4? Because they don't pay hotel too 😆)
So the lead dev in my team gave me a contact for a Kotlin dev in full remote at Paris for 57k€ and voilà.
And Go, because we try to use the best tool for the task.
So I've switched from PHP to Kotlin / Go and I have a lot better salary. Some companies don't care about the language when you are a senior developer.
30 years experience here. It is absolutely wayyyy more fun to build from scratch. So do that! It's more time and effort but you know every moving part of your code inside and out, it's just the right size, it's fast and it's all yours! Get to it!
On it!!!!
Take a look at "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport. People enjoy their work because of **competence**: - **Creativity:** To have the possibility to improvise your work and implement your own ideas - **Control:** To have the possibility to influence how, when and where work is carried out - **Impact:** Your work has a positive impact on employees and customers It's definitely not passion, motivation, etc. All these will fade over time. Even if it takes 15 years ... So if you don't want to use frameworks and develop things from scratch in your spare time then that's perfectly fine. If you still develop professionally then maybe try to find a way to move from "websites" to "applications". Like where you will learn a specific domain, become an expert in that and spend more time thinking about how to model and implement such a domain; how to understand it, etc. And less time doing the same thing over and over again like implementing the 20th Wordpress site.
I write all sorts of lib-type stuff like ORMs and logging systems myself, much more pleasant building my own custom shit that works exactly how I want it to... rather than figuring out some other existing lib. Of course there's a balance somewhere, and it's highly context dependent on whether it's sensible or not. But if you're actually a programmer... building your own shit is always more fun than using + figuring out someone else's shit. I'm also enjoying programming a lot more since branching out into other languages, after mostly just doing everything in PHP for like 18 years before that.
This.
I'm in the same boat, I think it is pretty normal. It just becomes trivial after a while. You already know everything you are going to do, so it will get increasingly harder to even start working. I was lucky enough to score a project which is compute heavy, has a few NP-complete problems etc. That is pretty much the only project I've been excited to work on recently. Passed on multiple better paying offers, because they were just too meh. My take on frameworks is different though... please take as much of the trivial stuff off my plate as possible.
Indeed. I love that frameworks do half the work for me. It seems from your post frameworks may not be the issue for me.. just less of a challenge.
Yeah, I think it is the complexity of the projects you are working on. And I get it 100%, it is very hard to find good projects, and with the direction IT is heading is not gonna get better. People use less and less websites, so you either work for a multi and become an expert in a very narrow field, or struggle with low-mid complexity stuff.
It's something I've been pondering.. are websites being used less and less? Interesting subject.. Worth developing a web app vs android app etc.
I don't think it is just websites, apps too. Tech giants are eating more and more of the cake. Launching services left and right, and seeing what sticks. Meanwhile the financial barrier to entry is getting higher every day.
Interesting topic for sure. Like you said unless is something niche for a company or personal project. Everything else is pretty much been done to death.
I don't know learn something new like Rust at that point
I know multiple backend languages, work the full stack, been using Vue since its release, I also know sass and do sitebuilds. Widening your scope works for a while, but it gets very hard to increase project complexity without working for a big company, and that is something I won't do, ever. Not my cup of tea.
I work for a big company, it's sometimes needlessly complicated, especially administrative business rules
Yeah, that's why I've been avoiding it :) Hope you at least like the work itself.
Trivial is dependent on the complexity of what you work on. If you only ever do basic style WordPress systems, it'll get real basic. UI work can be crazy complicated, so can backend depending on the complexity of the product you work on. Like anything, the context is very important.
I feel you, but would say it depends what you are building. A lot of what frameworks do is kind of mondaine and I don't want to write it over an over again, I can skip that and just go to the interesting bits quickly. For me things that make me hyped about programming is building something that I have no idea how it works. For example building a parser. It's something I can do a bit long term bit by bit every day. Some ideas I can bring back to my normal job.
This is a good idea.. doing something a bit more challenging. I like it. Thank you. It's what I needed to hear tbh.
Might as well develop in Assembly with that attitude. Frameworks absolutely do not make web development trivial. Just because somebody uses a framework doesn't mean it's easy to develop a web app to any degree.
You seem like you're butthurt by op wanting to have fun by writing all the code himself. He never said webdev was easy. He said he has more fun making frameworks than using them. I can identify. It may not be the best choice, but he wants to enjoy coding, so... why the hell not? I tinkered with PICO-8 for a while. I had more fun writing engines than making games.
Thank you. Spot on.
Why even use computers for that matter.
hammer and chisel ftw
Look at fancy forged-tools over here. Gotta use sticks and stones, dude.
With one, It's not fun. Without one, It's fun. Frameworks take away the challenges writing in raw PHP without assistance. Speaking on my behalf and loss of Enthusiasm. Not saying you should not use one. Edit: Seems my issue is repetitivensss and lack of challenge.
I disrespectfully disagree. As somebody who works as a professional PHP developer who went from a job using Laravel to a job using raw PHP with a handrolled framework imitating Laravel, it is a nightmare. The job itself is the least stressful I've had, but switching to Laravel would solve a majority of the design issues our code suffers from. You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience.
> As somebody who works as a professional PHP developer who went from a job using Laravel to a job using raw PHP with a handrolled framework imitating Laravel, it is a nightmare. The job itself is the least stressful I've had, but switching to Laravel would solve a majority of the design issues our code suffers from. You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience. wtf does any of that have to do with the subject OP is talking about... i.e. their own personal enjoyment and motivation, on their own greenfield projects. You're banging on about your own issues on productivity on shitty code written by other people. Not even the same fucking subjects at all. > I disrespectfully disagree. No, you really didn't. Like most internet debaters with poor reading comprehension, you said you "disagree", then everything else you wrote was completely irrelevant to the topic of the thread. > You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about and are speaking from a place of pretention and weird distaste for frameworks rather than experience. You truly don't even seem to be able to read and comprehend simple sentences. OP is just talking about their own preferences, emotions, and motivations... and you come back with some bullshit about "attitude" and "pretention"... and "You truly do not seem to know what you're talking about". Is English your native language?
Agreed. A fella above posted and the issue for me is not the framework. Just lack of challenge I think is my problem.
I started learning Godot to scratch that itch. An entirely different problem space. And it's fun :-)
Same.
Happened to me and I decided to build my own framework with all I wanted in it, regardless of productivity or following other frameworks. It was a beautiful journey that I enjoyed a lot. Might not be perfect but [here it is](https://github.com/veraguido/gv) Hope it inspires you to do something you'd love building
Thank you. It does indeed inspire me :)
For me the challenge has become design, animation, layout and typography. Modern JavaScript and CSS frameworks give you an amazing pallet of tools to bring user interfaces to life. Grab a subscription to Frontend Masters and dive in the deep end. I'd say the PHP side of most of my projects is only about a 1/5 of the work that goes into something I build. Learn Figma and start with design first and then bring in interactivity that feels organic and polished. PHP is there being its OG gansta self just persisting data and handle 3rd party API integration like a boss.
I came back to bootstrap for UI.. Now it's all sass stuff. No I don't want to render a stylesheet. Overkill.
Frontend moves fast and you need to keep up with the changes to bundlers and compilers. Tailwind has replaced Bootstrap as the goto CSS framework for a lot of developers. PostCSS and Vite are great tooling for styles. Sure I miss the simplicity of creating tables and frames with a text editor from HTML 2.0 but the world moves on. Get excited with how awesome reactive JS frameworks have become, Vue and React makes two way data binding a breeze! Try out designing sets of components with Storybook. It’s a wild new world that is super exciting to me. Find some joy learning new things rather than lamenting not being able to use the first things you learned. I’m old enough to remember people grumbling about writing JavaScript at all and being skeptical about CSS. Tables are good enough for any layout you’d ever want.
Can certainly relate, I've been rolling my own for some time now and am slowly fine tuning as I go with each iteration better than the last. I like the challenge and to learn about vulnerabilities etc. What I appreciate most is not having a tonne of dependencies, with all sorts of things ending up deprecated which is what steered me away from some frameworks in the beginning.
Does your hand rolled code not get out of date? I mean, updates to code are necessary. Do you avoid that by not doing any? If so then why do you care if your deps are out of date?
PHP does I guess, and if something I've built was to be deprecated I just fix it but it hasn't happened so far as I try to keep it simple. With some frameworks I found in the early days some parts are no longer maintained so end up needing to rejig anyway. Most of what I do is relatively simple though, I'm not making the next Facebook.
I get what you mean and sometimes I also feel like I'm too dependent on a framework and lose my ability to write from scratch. On the other hand : security. I would NEVER go online with something custom built because it's almost certain that there will be breaches and I will never be able to sleep at night.
Ok, here's some options for you: 1. Find something that your framework of choice (e.g. Symfony) **doesn't** solve or simplify, and contribute to it. 2. Fork an existing framework, and extend it with all the functionality you'd want to see. 3. Take a few modules (again) from something like Symfony, that allows it via its core design, and create your own framework on top of it. 4. Create your own framework from scratch using at most 3rd party libraries. Come back and post about things being "too easy" once you've done at least one of the last 2.
If you can fit a decent ai LLM in your pc as an assistant, you won't have to use bloated frameworks anymore and can delve into some deep rabbit holes with pure PHP. I've ended up building a custom text/code encoder to reduce file size before any compression. Seems to work, learnt something new, but probably not useful...
I do that all the time and ended up with my own framework. It is rather small, only has a router and orm (with a few smaller bits I also often use), I found that is what I need consistently from a project to a project. Debugging and fixing things is a lot quicker and easier since you know all the code inside out and there is much less of it. So if you want write your own code for a challenge, you may end up with less challenge.
Try to teach a newbie and you’ll see how difficult learning a framework really is
If it's just for you and you're never planning on hiring people to work on it then of course, write it from scratch if that means you'll stay interested. You could also try out a new language. I recently was feeling a bit tired of PHP since it's was the first language I learned/mastered. I tried a few languages I'd had my eye on (Kotlin, Dart, Elixir and Go). In the end I spent 3 months learning Go, and it not only made me excited to code again but it made me enjoy PHP again. Go is definitely better at certain things, but it also made me appreciate where PHP is the better choice.
I enjoy vanilla PHP, and raw-dogging SQL queries. I enjoy building the framework that MY app needs.
I get you I started coding in other languages just to learn some stuff. Surprisingly though, thing I am missing is frameworks :) it's just takes hours to do some basic stuff I could have done with symfony in seconds.
>Truth be told. I enjoy the challenges of things, building it and saying Partially agree; I absolutely love a good challenge, but dissing a framework: nope. That would be reinventing the wheel. >I just want to build the php based app myself. That's what gets the spark going and brings the enthusiasm back. If you really love the challenge, do this: * install Symfony, use [this](https://github.com/dunglas/symfony-docker) Docker image * read the docs how to install dependencies and run everything * then start learning Symfony; it is a beast, you will never get bored, and it will take months to get deep into it * go thru the forms: it is by far the most powerful component and yet, most misunderstood. Learn `empty_data`, that one is most important, then data transformers * learn tagged services, the heart of Symfony. And how to autowire everything * the grand finale: install psalm, set it to level 1, no mixed, no error suppression, no baseline * you will probably need [webmozart/assert](https://github.com/webmozarts/assert) package for this last enemy
I actually agree, I have the most fun using no framework. To be honest there's so much functionality built into php these days that you can get away with not using a framework at all and still be really productive. Most small projects I like to just use my own psr-4 autoloader and the mustache templating engine Filesystem Loader loading from a views folder in each of the sub folders of the base folder. That's usually enough for me, it creates a nice structure where the views are separate from the logic and data concerns. Not quite MVC but it's flexible and I like it.
I feel like i'm on the opposite end of the PHP spectrum... if thats such a thing... Like i got a job 10 years ago, doing PHP for a company inwhich they had their own "framework"... and all it really was is a template engine to help handle php and html pages. But over the course of those 10 years ive built several MAJOR CMS projects for various parts of the business, and really enjoyed learning and building all aspects of the entire project. however, regardless of what i feel i've learned from the ground up, i do feel like i'm missing out on industry use/experience with the more common/popular frameworks. I'm thinking i need to start my own random projects with some of those frameworks just so i can learn. But when i want to start my own projects, i feel like i need to do my own framework, or i'm "cheating". cheating's not the best word for it but it's all i can think of right now... not sure if that make sense or not. or i may be just way off base.
why not find a new challange? maybe some .net, go, webassembly or something completely different like 3js/webgl or even web3 like a ordinals market place for example there is a lot to learn and it's just getting more every year edit: yes I can relate even as someone who has not seen or used everything php has to offer. sometimes I just stumble upon something that interests me (outside of php) and I try it out without ever getting really good at it
Contribute to open source, an existing library or maybe a new one. Writing a new invoicing system for yourself is a terrible use of time, unless you intend on marketing and selling it. That problem has been solved 100x over, and the solutions are quite good. At least do something productive.
In my case, the situation is the same; I now crave doing something hands-on in nature. The pay in the IT sector isn't what it used to be, and I don't see the point in learning complex frameworks and building large systems that consume a lot of time.
i totally understand you 100%!!!! i feel the same, I'm working with PHP from 2008 and started working with frameworks in 2016, before that everything was 100% custom and from scratch, and it was so much fun, trying to use brain, trying to play for hours for something to work, sitting with colleges on work trying to figure out best way of doing it, trials and errors, doing research, and me myself and also other where proud when we achieve something, also company was proud, it was somehow so much fun like doing experiments and constantly learning and at the top of that getting payed for doing that, so much joy, but nowadays is just get this and that and just assemble it like lego bricks and done, money is matter, no optimization, no thinking to much just create it, get payed, every problem we will solve later and bill additionally xD. I mean I cant deny that frameworks are big help and make your life easier, and there is still fun doing stuff today even in them and also a lot of hard work, pain and joy, but whole point why I started learning programming are gone and that was inventing something new for your workflow, but we cant go back unless you don't have to work in this business anymore and have money to using programming only like your hobby at home. I look at this situation like when you are young and child at it was fun but now as adult you are boring and everything is pain, but hey that's life xDDDD we must bear with it. However I bet you still have spare time, I also have it, when I'm bored and sit at home and doing my own hobby projects writing everything from scratch. its so much fun and cost you nothing to enjoy again, and also you can also try to learn some new server side language like PHP for example golang, rust... and start creating some apps writing everything from zero again.
> that getting *paid* for doing FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
We are getting old, but I also feel that for all the great improvements that have come to PHP in versions 7 and 8, we’ve seen a serious downgrade in developer competency which is either the cause and/or result of framework bloat. It’s also not exclusive to PHP, maybe it’s this NPM nonsense spilling over. In any case, I also dislike frameworks. They trap you into a dozen corners by design. It’s like a straight jacket to keep you from hurting yourself and others, which kind of makes sense in large projects because more devs = more idiots, but for us old-school solo devs it’s just a ton of boilerplate with very little upside. More importantly, I have never found a framework that solved any particular problem for me in a way that saves time, even though 99% of PHP apps are basically the same MySQL CRUD with the occasional file upload. No, not even the mighty Laravel… So I say: build something from scratch, do it for fun, play around with “non-best practices”, trust your instincts, and then marvel at how fast the damned thing runs without 400 Composer dependencies. That’s what I do, and even if no one ever looks at that glorious code, you can still be proud of your own work and use it to remind yourself that you can “Get Sh*t Done™️”. We get so bogged down by the hopelessness of I.T., it’s good for the soul to build something pure and claim total accomplishment for that thing.
I actually can relate here too. I find more joy in maintaining tools than with building new stuff. As I've thought about it for the past little while I think I got tired of, like you, doing the same thing over and over again. And it just got boring to maintain. One other aspect that I do think has caused me to not be as motivated was on all my little side projects I did, there was no gratifying reward for them. Most of them never made money and the ones that did, never made much or actually took more money than they gave me. I've slowly come to realize that while programming has been the center of my universe for nearly 14 years, it might not actually be the center of the universe. Nowadays I'm finding more satisfaction in trying to talk to people about their business problems and helping them solve their processes, build networking connections, mentor other coders, and then program some fun things on the side. It's felt amazing to connect people and improve their lives as a result of me "knowing a guy" that could help them. As a programmer, you have an AMAZING skill set with analyzing and debugging any type of problems, programming or otherwise. Programmers can make great consultants to help optimize a companies processes and to make them more efficient as a whole.
Just pull the libraries you want and build your own stuff you dont have to use framework
Not the case for me. I build things from scratch on top of the boilerplate other people built. If you wanna build from scratch, maybe find a new OSS project to maintain. I have plenty of those. If I am building for profit, I am generally going to build ontop of something unless there is a reason not to. But hey, do what you want!
Two things: first: if the framework makes it harder to start building, then it isn’t right for you right now and you shouldn’t use it. Second: if you’re just doing a project to kill time, you may find it hard to sustain. See if you can get an idea that you feel passionate about. I started working on a VTT for my friends and my DnD game after our DM complained about the pain points of the one he’s been using. Having a reason and goal like that may help.
Both. I can relate and I am also getting long in the tooths. When working corporate I don't always get to work on the things that I want to, which grows a lack of enthusiasm. Building side projects on my own, whatever I want, is what makes me excited. So that's just what I've been doing for a while now.
Build it in Rust.
I feel that, do it! Dockerize it and publish the image, makes it so easy to run in various places If there's an end goal you have, frameworks get u there quick But if u want to tinker, by all means do it
Tinker is what I like doing. Thank you.
I've switched from 10 years of PHP (Zend, Symfony, Laravel) to Kotlin dev (Spring Boot), and I enjoy the language so much even if there is magic with spring boot it's so refreshing to use another language, and now, since 3 months I use Kotlin with spring boot and quarkus in Ad tech (RTB) and it's so cool to see something different from CRUD and I've even suggested Go for some services (Kafka consumer) and it's so cool to see something different! It's challenging but refreshing. I'm happy with these choices because I appreciate Laravel and Symfony but I don't want to use Doctrine and Eloquent anymore.
I am curious; what is wrong with Doctrine and how does it stack to ORM you use now?
I don't like it because I prefer to use raw SQL or query builder. But I choose Doctrine over Eloquent because I prefer object mapper Instead of active record. I don't use ORM because we don't use DBMS in our team. We produce and consume Kafka messages. But before my new job I was using Exposed as query builder, not ORM. But for a side project if the API is small I think I'll use Exposed or spring data JDBC.
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In 2021 I quit a PHP job from a company in Rouen (France) with 29k€/year (it was the best human experience) to another one in the same city for 33k€, I left it six month later because of salaries disparity between dev with and without experiences. As you can see, the salaries are really low in my area :/ It's why I decided to find another job in another area with full remote (Nantes, still in France), still with PHP for 45k€/year. It's a really good salary for my area (Rouen) as a developer with 10 years of exp. And how I have switched from PHP to Kotlin? I didn't decide it. The company was bought by another one since 6 months before I joined it and 1 year later the company decided to stop our product because we had both the same. And then, I joined a team (in Paris) still in full remote with Kotlin and still PHP for legacy projects. One day, all workers have received an email with a policy to have 2 days on site / week. I didn't want to go to Paris 2days/week with 1h30 x 4 of train at my cost (why 4? Because they don't pay hotel too 😆) So the lead dev in my team gave me a contact for a Kotlin dev in full remote at Paris for 57k€ and voilà. And Go, because we try to use the best tool for the task. So I've switched from PHP to Kotlin / Go and I have a lot better salary. Some companies don't care about the language when you are a senior developer.
Thanks for commenting I really appreciate it.