In this episode, I had a wonderful chat with fellow Australian and former expat, Nigel James, about his journey from SAP consulting to PHP, and what life was like as a consultant over so many years in London. Our time there overlapped, but we never met. We also talked about why PHP is still an excellent choice to develop with, how Laravel is a Marketing-lead development (and that that's not a good thing), and so much more.

So if you're keen to get into software consulting, or want to do better at it, tune in to hear from someone who's been doing it for years.

Some key takeaways are:

• Programming is simple: Sequence. Selection. Repetition.
• Almost regardless of your career path as a developer and your skills, you need to develop some business savvy.
• A great selling point for PHP (at least in the early days) was that you didn't have to pay Microsoft for so much; this was one of my key motivations too, back in the PHP 3.x days.
• Are layoffs necessarily all bad, or can they actually be helpful?
• Are layoffs in tech truly necessary right now, or are they being made to satisfy investors?

Links

• ABAP
• SAP
• Zend Framework 1 (now Laminas)
• PHP London
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (Developer's Library)
• Laravel

Guest(s): Nigel James (@njames // phpc.social/@njames).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had a long and winding discussion about software testing with the legendary Grumpy Programmer Chris Hartjes.

We talked about the importance of learning the essentials of software testing rather than focusing on a particular framework, as that makes your skills so much more transferable. We discussed how to approach testing; it's not a framework-first approach. And we also discussed the latest PHP testing framework, Pest PHP, covering what it brings to the table and whether people should just stick to older veterans, such as PHPUnit, or not.

Some key takeaways are:

• You should learn the essentials of testing first, and not a specific tool such as PHPUnit or Pest PHP
• It's better if people worry less about the tool and more about testing concepts
• The people who write the best tests are also really talented programmers, because you can't be a shitty programmer and write good tests
• Testing is an intermediate skill. You have to know how code before you can write tests
• When approaching testing something, ask: "How would I manually do this?". Don't think about testing concepts or a framework straight away
• If people would spend as much time learning the fundamentals (of testing), they'd see that their skills are transferable.
• Composer saved PHP. It kept PHP from just being the thing that runs WordPress
• Bill Joy on Linux and macOS: "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.'

Links

• The Arrange, Act, Assert pattern
• Pest PHP
• PHPUnit
• Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck
• Rector
• PHP's Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
• NixOS
• Mozilla
• The RemoteOK.io thread
• Laravel

Guests: Chris Hartjes.

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of continuing to talk with Arne Blankerts about one of my favourite topics: containers. We talked about his misgivings with Docker, his love of Podman, some of the history of containers and container plumbing in the Linux kernel, how Docker's architecture can lead to security issues, and so much more.

If you're in to containers in any way, or are thinking of getting in to them, this episode is for you!

Some key takeaways are:

• Podman Compose is almost an equivalent to Docker Compose
• Podman is virtually a drop-in replacement for Docker
• Podman doesn't require a daemon and doesn't require root
• Isolated processes just make sense
• The kernel can't directly control containers when using Docker

Links

• Podman
• Kubernetes
• FreeBSD Jails
• chroot
• Introduction to Control Groups (Cgroups)
• Demystifying containers, part 1: Kernel Space
• Linux Containers (LXC)
• Podman Compose
• Laravel - The PHP Framework for Web Artisans
• Dan Walsh (Twitter, Blog)
• Podman in Action, by Dan Walsh
• Docker security issues
• Confoo.ca
• The future is now: Replacing Docker with Podman
• Honey, I shrunk the Container!

Guests: Arne Blankerts (@arneblankerts).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with my mate and colleague Darryl Ware, who I worked with in Brisbane (Australia) oh so many years ago, about the changing face of tech in Brisbane. He shared with me (as I've been living in Europe for the last 15 years) that it's changed from a broadly PHP-based city to a much more Golang-centric place (along with Node and Java).

We also talked about C-based languages and how they rise and fall over the course of time. Then, on top of that, we talked about how you can, if it's possible, to constantly keep up with technology, if it's worth it, and when it's okay to just walk away and start something new.

Some key takeaways are:

• Tech is very transitory
• PHP is fading in Brisbane
• Cloud providers can dissuade people from using PHP (I strongly agree)
• Nothing stays the same in tech and life
• When do you stop adding language features
• Is it C double-plus or C++? I think we all know the answer
• PHP had a poor reputation for years because it had an exceedingly low barrier to entry, but it's so much more now
• Perl 6 took too long to come to market
• Composer ROCKS!

Links

• Brisbane, Australia
• Corporate Agile-Fall
• Business Buzzword Bingo
• Bob Martin on SOLID Principles

Guests: Darryl Ware (@darrylware).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt "network".

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Bierer about his history in computing, a history which if you're a computing hardware or programming nerd, you're going to love. Doug shares how he got in to computing with the TRS-80 and Commodore 64. How he taught himself to program in Assembler during shifts when he had some quiet time, and how music was what lead him to programming. We both recount our time in computing back in the 90's and what it was like to work with Microsoft Windows and UNIX/Linux.

Some key takeaways are:

• Throwing hardware at the problem doesn't fix it.
• Bad code upon bad code just makes more bad code.
• Automating code creation doesn't necessarily result in good code.
• Less is more.

A Giveaway

For a chance to win a copy of Doug's new Book, PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices, leave your thoughts, your feedback on the episode. Doug and I will give one copy of the book to the person that, in our opinion, leaves the most interesting feedback. You can comment at https://www.freethegeek.fm/48, or on Twitter. Make sure you tag the show (@freeingthegeek).

Links

• PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices (Doug's NEW Book)
• Unlikely Source (Doug's Company)
• The TRS-80
• The Commodore 64
• DR DOS
• The Motorola 6809
• Peek and Poke
• Unixware
• Novell
• U.S. Antitrust law
• GitHub Copilot
• Potsdam State University of New York

Guests: Doug Bierer (@bierer_doug).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt "network".

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Mihalis Tsoukalos, a long-time Twitter friend and someone who's given me loads of advice, about software development.

He shared with me so much about his journey with C-based languages, particularly Python, C, Go, & Rust. He talked about Linux shells including Bash and Zsh (and of course the excellent Oh My Zsh project). On the flip side, he shared why he's no fan of Java and Microsoft Windows, preferring almost all things Linux and Unix.

Then, he finished up by talking about file formats such as Latex, Markdown, and AsciiDoc (my favourite format), the importance of software documentation, and what he believes it takes to become a professional developer. You don't want to miss this closing aspect of the episode!

Some key takeaways are:

• Start by writing small command-line utilities, re-implementing the ones that you know. Then, gradually take on bigger, more complex ones.
• Keep writing code and keep improving each time.
• Read a lot of code, experiment even more, talk to other developers, and fail better each time. Even if you only learn a little something, it's something more than you knew before.
• Software documentation is very important.
• To learn Rust, you really have to do it full-time.
• He's a big fan of Go because of the speed, size of the standard library, and because it's a simple and fast language.

Links

• Mastering Go, 3rd edition (written by Mihalis)
• Go Systems Programming (written by Mihalis)
• Latex
• AsciiDoc
• Markdown
• Oh My Zsh

Guests: Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew@matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

It was a pleasure to sit down and chat with Oliver, a full-stack software consultant based in South Wales, in the UK. We talked about so many things which I'm sure so many developers can relate to, even those who've only been developing for a relatively short period of time.

Some key takeaways are:

• Both working remotely and working in an office have benefits and drawbacks. It's really up to the person and the organisation as to whether it will work or not, and both have to be professional and trust each other.
• Pair programming is a wonderful opportunity to learn the most unexpected things and to grow as developers
• Being in the same room as others can often feel much "warmer" than over a video link
• While working remotely can be more challenging to communicate fully, it can be done, if you're prepared to engage.

Links

• PHP South Wales
• OliverDaviesLtd
• Drupal
• Pair programming
• Bus factor

Guests: Oliver Davies (@opdavies).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew@matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

It was a pleasure to sit down and chat with Karl for this episode which went off on such a massive tangent at the start. Despite that, we felt it was worth keeping, as sometimes it's worth doing things a little differently. If you want to skip to the more tech/work/career aspect of the episode, jump up to about the 21 or 32 minute mark.

Some points from the episode:

• Should people be paid based on where they live or should they be paid on the role and its value to the company/organisation?
• How do you make the mental shift from employee to business owner when creating a business?
• What do you really want to do all day (5 days a week, 44-odd weeks a year)?
• When do you work best?
• Where do you work best?
• Work with intention.
• If you decided to start a business, the first few (or more) likely won't be your best.
• Enjoy the journey as well as the little wins.

Links

• Tim Minchin / Storm
• Draft.dev

Guests: Karl Hughes (@KarlLHughes).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew@matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.