Comment by Azhovan Asadi on "I am Fabien Potencier, creator of Symfony (PHP Framework). Ask me anything!"

Hello Fabien,

How do you balance between life and your job as a greedy developer, you are developing more than 15 years and almost you wrote all the codes
what is the difference between good PHP developer and a perfect PHP developer?
are you expert as much as your PHP skills in other skills like a database?
what did you do wrong as PHP GURU, in your career?

I don't think we can talk about a standard "good" PHP developer. Being a good (PHP) developer is not just about technical skills.

I would say that a perfect PHP developer is aware of the PHP shortcomings and also aware of PHP strengths. They made a conscious decision to use PHP for some projects (not necessarily for all projects). A perfect PHP developer is also very curious about what happens outside of their comfort zone: being curious about other frameworks, other CMSes, other languages, and other platforms.

A perfect PHP developer is one who can see value in learning different/new technologies. But at the same time, one who is able to choose the right technology depending on the task at hand. A perfect PHP developer knows when to use boring/proved technologies and when to test new/hyped technologies.

Regarding the question about being an expert, I'm not sure I'm a PHP "expert". I'm trying to build a PHP framework that solves the kind of problems I'm interested in. I like to learn new things, so along the years, I also learned a lot, from other languages (Python, Ruby, Go, ...) to web related technologies (PostgreSQL, ...).

Something I did wrong as a PHP dev? I should have created Laravel before Taylor :)

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

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