In this part of the interview series, I’m interviewing this channel’s editor, Bruno Škvorc, along with the feedback from Gary Hockin from Roave. We’ll start with Gary.
Gary Hockin
What lead you to PHP?
Simply, classic ASP. I was working as a general dogsbody in a huge steelworks in Port Talbot, and we were paying thousands of pounds for licenses, to display data from an Oracle database on lots of screens.
I started looking into ways of displaying that data on multiple screens for free - each machine had IE6 (at the time) so I explored ASP.
From there I realised that I loved the role of web development and quickly learned PHP in my own time, as I realised then that open source was where the future was.
What have been the things about PHP that bit you?
In a positive way, originally it’s the fact that you can create these amazing interactive webpages which you can push to a $10 shared host and point your friends to it to play with.
When I was a “kid” that was what kept me coming back to messing around with PHP, and ultimately why I shifted my career around it. More recently it’s the community. The community is simply amazing.
What have been the highlights or redeeming features
Of my career in PHP? I touched on it early, the community has been truly an epiphany for me. About 5 years ago I was sitting around as a Ghost Developer (http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/02/the-ghost-who-codes-how-anonymity-is.html), working in semi-object-oriented PHP, when I suddenly realised that someone HAD to have created a standard framework for building PHP applications.
A quick Google led me to a list as long as your arm, but because we were already using Zend Guard on distributed servers I decided to use Zend Framework (1). From there I found the #zftalk IRC channel, and from there I got totally immersed in the ZF community.
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