PHP 8 just received a major new update and loads of new features were brought to this notorious programming language. In recent years, PHP has received major updates that considerably improved its performance and emphasized the use of OOP. Nonetheless, it looks like PHP is still not letting go of dubious practices. There are many, many nice features in the new version, such as the JIT compiler — which improves performance, constructor property promotion or structured metadata. Still, some of these new features promote bad practices. Below are five examples of such bad practices and how to avoid them.

Null safe operator

This…

More than a year ago, I stopped working with OKRs at both professional and personal levels. I did it because I changed companies at the professional level and because too many changes happened at the personal level. To sum it up: the pandemic started, I went back to my home country and started remote work.

One year later, I want to go back to the practice of OKRs and want to share my observations and the reasons behind this decision.

The most important thing that I’m missing is working with results-oriented people. Many times when picking up projects or work…

When I started my career as a software engineer, I was young and inexperienced. I was not sure what I needed to learn, how to do my job, and I was missing information that could help me. I didn’t have a mentor or a coach, nor did I have senior engineers that could guide me easily; they were very good at their job, but they couldn’t explain why. I always wished there was a guideline or a rulebook that I could follow so I could improve myself and my work. I searched the internet for articles and books with opinions…

I started working with PHP many years ago. I was 15 years old, and I didn’t have any formal education or knowledge about programming or engineering. I was just curious about it. Initially, I used it to send emails with the help of mail() function, and then I started to work with forms and slowly learned control structures. By the time I went to university, I was familiar with basic programming and a few OOP features. By the time I finished university, I was able to work with frameworks such as CakePHP, I knew about ORM, dependency injection, and design…

You’ve just joined a new team or company. Or maybe your team starts working on a fresh project. Or maybe there is a strong business need to deliver a piece of software quickly. Whatever the situation, for some hard-to-understand reason, your squad is not doing automated tests. It might be the case of simple unit tests or it might be the case for advanced automated performance tests. You’re an experienced developer and you know the value that automated tests bring, both in the short and long term. You feel frustrated that your team doesn’t show interest in your vision. You…

In the past, whenever I wanted to change jobs, I used to go to LinkedIn, search for a job title and then tinker with the filters until I got reasonably relevant results to what I was looking for. Then I would go through each vacancy, read the description and check if it’s a good fit for me or not. Then I would apply. This is the traditional method of searching for a job, It worked for me multiple times and I’m sure it’s being used by the big majority of people out there, but I feel that it’s no longer…

Over the years, I’ve had over 30 late-stage interviews and I’ve interviewed at least 50 people for engineering roles in my teams. In the last 2 years, 15 companies interviewed me and I received 10 offers. I changed companies 3 times and I want to say that I’m not going to interviews for a new job, but because interviews provide valuable experiences, feedback, and training. I schedule an interview every 3 months and I recommend this practice to everybody working in the technology industry, regardless if they are looking for a job or not. Let me explain why.

Career growth

For me…

I lived in Vienna for more than a year before moving to Amsterdam 6 months ago. I’ve worked as a software engineer in both cities and I want to share how they compare and also how the tech scene looks like. Both places are amazing and living in any of them is an excellent experience. You can’t go wrong by picking one over the other. Both cities are big tourist attractions, with a high standard of income and offer great experiences.

While I was on a weekend getaway in Vienna, a friend who knew I was looking for work opportunities…