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

Being proficient is the same for all languages and technologies: you need to read a lot of code. Symfony was my first PHP projects. As such, I made a lot of mistakes. But I learned everything I know by reading other's code, in many different languages. I read Java Spring's code... even if I've never written a line of Java. I read Ruby on Rails code, and Django one. I got inspiration from a lot of great Open-Source projects.

Being proficient means coding. Coding a lot. For fun or for profit. It takes time. Project after project, try to learn something new.

My advice: be pragmatic. Don't listen to people advocating design patterns at all costs. Don't try to make your code perfect. Learn to love fixing other's code.

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